Members of the Tribe (37 page)

There are still about eight hundred Jews in Colchester, but most of the old Jewish institutions are now historical landmarks. Steve pointed them out as we drove—a frame building that once housed the mikvah, a sprawling shingle mansion that used to be the Cohen Hotel, and the workshop of Levine & Levine,
FAMOUS MAKER OF WOMEN
’
S SHOES
,
FOUNDED 1922.
Only two synagogues are left; next to the one I attended that morning is Walter’s Kosher Bakery, which Steve claimed has the best onion rolls north of Flatbush Avenue. And Walter isn’t even Jewish.

The synagogue itself turned out to be a barnlike building, much larger than Colchester’s depleted Jewish population now requires. Its fixtures are a written record of the congregation’s history—virtually everything in the place is covered with a donor’s plaque. These include a
CHANDELIER IN MEMORY OF MR
.
AND MRS
.
ISAAC HOROWITZ
;
ETERNAL LIGHT IN MEMORY OF DR
.
AND MRS
.
HEYMAN
;
DOOR IN LOVING MEMORY OF HYMAN ALPERT
; and my favorites—
AIR CONDITIONER DONATED BY MR
.
AND MRS
.
MORRIS SCHULMAN
and
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
(a statue, not the original)
DEDICATED IN MEMORY OF ISIDORE BROUNSTEIN
.

It was Succot, the Feast of Tabernacles, and I was interested to see how the Jewish farmers of Colchester celebrated the agricultural festival. But the service that morning was unremarkable. Following the prayers, everyone gathered in a small ceremonial booth outside the synagogue, toasted the holiday with wine, and talked about their coming winter migration to Florida. “There aren’t many Jewish farmers left around here anymore,” Rabbi Scheindlin told me. “Most of them are retired. It’s not easy to make a living in agriculture anymore.”

I left the synagogue and walked through the town. Colchester is built around a village green, complete with white steepled church, red brick schoolhouse, and a war memorial. The roster of veterans on the monument tells the story of the town. Its Civil War
vets had names like Hawthorne, Styles, and Johnston; but by World War I, the names had changed to Saul Agranovitch and Isador Blatt, Hyman Kravitzky and Julius Cohen. Dozens of Jewish boys served in World War I, World War II, and Korea. Three—Rudy Klein, Morris Heller, and Richard Adler—have stars beside their names.

I stood looking at the monument for a long moment; in Israel, the war memorials list soldiers with similar last names. Then I walked across the green to Tami’s Cafe, where Sid Einhorn and old man Steg were chewing the fat.

Mr. Steg sat at the horseshoe-shaped counter sipping weak coffee and tapping a spoon to a Boxcar Willie rendition of “Lonesome Hobo” that was playing on the jukebox. He was born in Europe around the turn of the century and came to town as a young man. Now in his mid-eighties, he is still alert and dapper. For many years, Steg was the town assessor. He also served as president at the local Knights of Pythias chapter and as master of the Colchester Grange with the rank of Ceres.

Sid Einhorn sat across the horseshoe counter and munched a doughnut. Einhorn is a powerfully built fellow with a farmer’s sloping shoulders and big weather-hardened hands. His father moved to Colchester around 1910 and worked as a cutter at the S&S Leather Company. Later, just after World War I, he bought a poultry farm, where Sid was born and raised.

“It was Little Israel around here in those days,” said Einhorn, and Steg nodded in agreement. “I was six or seven before I spoke anything but Yiddish. I never even saw anyone who wasn’t Jewish until the first grade.”

“There weren’t many goyim around then,” Steg observed with the judiciousness of a retired politician, “but the ones there were were fine people.”

“Fine people,” Einhorn agreed. “A goy’s a goy, but they were good people.”

Einhorn bought his first farm when he was seventeen, a thirty-acre poultry operation, and he spent the next three decades raising chickens and cattle. But it was impossible to make a living as a small farmer, and after World War II he bought a feed and hardware store to supplement his income.

“When I first started out, chickens were still floor birds,” he
said. “In those days, one man could take care of seven thousand layers. But nowadays, everything’s in cages. One man can take care of seventy thousand or eighty thousand birds. There’s no way that small farmers can compete with that. So I gave it up in the mid-sixties. But I still get outdoors plenty. I go trout fishing and deer hunting. It’s still great country up here.”

“The greatest country in the world,” said Steg, and tapped his spoon on his coffee cup for a refill.

As we were talking, Steve Schwartz came in. He greeted Einhorn, whose father used to sleep on the floor of Steve’s grandfather’s factory when he first came to town. He greeted Mr. Steg, who assessed his father’s business. He greeted the waitress, who gave him a cup of coffee without being asked.

Steve Schwartz knows everyone in Colchester and everyone knows him. His factory employs four hundred fifty people—out of a population of eight thousand. The S&S Christmas party is the major social event of the Colchester calendar. The Schwartz family has been in town for almost one hundred years.

Later that afternoon, Jake Mitzengendler and Marcia Schuster dropped in at the Schwartzes’ for a visit. Marcia is the daughter of another of Colchester’s leading Jewish families; her father, Paul Schuster, started out hauling fruit to market and eventually established the Schuster Trucking Company. Jake is a newcomer by local standards. He came to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1960 and settled in Colchester. His arrival in town was dramatic; on his first day in school he built a large, high-flying paper airplane that, in the post-Sputnik era, impressed and frightened his classmates.

Steve Schwartz and Marcia Schuster began to reminisce about their town and its folklore. They recalled old man Balaban, the cleaner who wore your suit all week before returning it laundered on Friday; the regulars at the shul who always kept a bottle of schnapps hidden under the synagogue stairwell for their morning medicinal shots and referred to the members of the rival synagogue as “the mugwumps”; the time Yank Broder had a tryout with the Boston Red Sox; the days when special trains used to leave Grand Central Station for Colchester, bringing up citified Jews for a week of fresh air at the Cohen Hotel. They told stories about the redneck Yiddish-speaking farmers who would spit tobacco into the gutter
as they idled in front of the general stores and ice cream parlors along Merchant’s Row, across from the war memorial. There was a timeless quality to the nostalgia. Events from the early days mixed easily with anecdotes from recent years. Colchester folklore comes naturally to Steve Schwartz and Marcia Schuster; it is their birthright.

Toward evening, Marcia and Jake left. Steve and Carla and I sat in the darkening shadows and chatted about the town and its future. Steve hopes that one of his sons will come home after college and take over the family business, making him the fourth generation at S&S.

“I’m not sure that either of them will want to, and we won’t get bent out of shape if they don’t, but it would be nice,” Steve said. “We have a big investment—and not just financial—in this place.”

“You’d never consider leaving, would you?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so. But I’ll be honest, I’m less sure today than I was a few years ago. Not long ago there was a kind of an anti-Semitic incident here in town. Nothing major, but still, it got us to thinking. That’s when we sat down and made a contingency plan.”

“What kind of contingency plan?”

“Nothing drastic,” Steve said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Just some thoughts about what we’d do if we were ever forced to leave Colchester or the United States in a hurry. I’m sure we’ll never need them, but …”

Suddenly I remembered the paper their son had written for his Harvard history course. “ ‘The Jews in Colchester are as firmly rooted in the land as the oldest Yankee families,’ ” I quoted. “Adam wrote that.”

Steve thought for a long moment. “Did he? Well, he’s right. We are rooted here. But we’re not Yankees. And after Germany, well, you never know. I mean, you never really know.”

While American Jewry focuses on the Holocaust and Israel, it has yet to come to terms with the clear and present danger of erosion from within. A generation ago, most Jews married other Jews; today, in many parts of the United States, this is no longer true. Sometimes the non-Jewish partner converts—according to the
UAHC, between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand American Jews were born Christian. Often, however, this is not the case.

Experts dispute the impact of intermarriage on the number of Jews in America. But there is no doubt that it has drastically altered the ethnic composition and internal dynamics of the Jewish community. Converts, even the most dedicated, have no tradition of Jewish solidarity, no blood ties to other Jews past or present, and no inherited Jewish cultural attitudes or skills. They may be devout believers or active members of their congregations; but it is unlikely that they will ever scrutinize film credits for Jewish names or cry when they see
Fiddler on the Roof
.

Some people view the demise of the old
kosher nostra
kind of ethnicity as a tragedy; but if so, it is an inevitable one. America does not offer the conditions for a distinct Eastern European-like Jewish culture. In most places, Judaism doesn’t seem to be about anything. It is a holding operation—an effort to wring one more generation of allegiance from people who are no longer sure what being a Jew is all about. In Israel, the national anthem is “Ha-Tikvah,” the hope; in America it is, “We’re Here Because We’re Here.”

When I was in Los Angeles, I discussed the shape of the Jewish future in America over lunch at Factor’s Deli with Bruce Phillips, who teaches demography at the Hebrew Union College, and Norman Mirsky, an eccentric sociologist who claims to be able to categorize Jews according to body type.

“There is a definite correlation between weight and affiliation,” Mirsky asserted. “The more Orthodox the congregation, the worse the bodies. And vice versa, the more Reform, the better the bodies. Temple Leo Baeck is the most upscale synagogue in L.A., and its bodies are absolutely the best. It’s what I’d call a size three congregation.”

My sister Julie and her husband Alan were there that day, and they laughed appreciatively. They don’t belong to Leo Baeck, but they could. Alan, in his early forties, is a Harvard-educated lawyer with a gentle, ironic manner. Julie is a bright, charmingly kooky suburban mom who works half time as a program director for their Reform temple. They have a split-level house, a Japanese car, a Chevy van, a live-in housekeeper from El Salvador, and two small
sons. Not long ago their six-year-old, Benjamin, asked if all Christians speak Spanish.

Julie and Alan care about being Jews. Although he is not Orthodox, Alan puts on a tallis and prays every morning. Julie takes courses at the University of Judaism. They are active in their temple, send their kids to Hebrew school, celebrate the holidays, and on Friday nights gather around the table to light Sabbath candles and sing blessings over the bread and the wine. They live in a safe little island of prosperity and middle-class respectability, like a Jewish Cosby family.

There are families like this all over the country, but they are rapidly becoming exceptional. In L.A., only one Jewish family in four belongs to a synagogue, and less than fifteen percent give money to the local federation. And by the year 2000, half the children under eighteen who consider themselves Jewish in Los Angeles will have a non-Jewish parent. “The numbers out here are a little worse than the rest of the country,” said Phillips, “but this is the wave of the future. After all, how often do you meet someone in Michigan or Brooklyn who moved there from L.A.?”

Some demographers have argued that intermarriage is a net gain for Judaism; more people “convert in” than “opt out.” Phillips pooh-poohed the notion. “It could be true, in strictly numerical terms. But most Christian partners don’t convert. And mixed couples who claim to be raising their kids as Jews rarely belong to synagogues or live in Jewish neighborhoods, so it isn’t entirely clear what they mean.”

“What can we do?” asked Julie. “I mean, how can we be sure that
our
children will marry Jews and have Jewish children?”

“There are five main factors that influence a decision like that,” said Phillips. “First, raise them in a Jewish neighborhood. Second, send them to Jewish camps in the summer. Third, give them an economic status that will allow them to interact with other Jews on a social level. Fourth, set an example of Jewish commitment at home. And fifth, when the time comes, send them to a college with a high percentage of Jewish students.”

“And if we do all that, what are the chances of them marrying Jews?” asked Alan.

“Ah, fifty-fifty,” said Phillips.

“That’s it?” asked Julie. “Fifty percent?”

“Statistically, yes,” said Phillips, and Mirsky nodded in confirmation.

“So what you’re saying is that the Jews are eventually going to disappear in America,” said Julie in a dismayed and somewhat angry voice. “You’re saying that we don’t have a chance.”

“No, I’m not saying that,” said Phillips dispassionately. “What you’ll have in the future is a very intense core of Jews, surrounded by a thin outer layer. And the inner core will be a visible reminder to the outer core of what Judaism is really all about.”

“It’s a function of life in America, that’s all,” Mirsky added. “There’s no reason to view people who marry out of the faith, or even leave it, as defectors. That’s unfair. The policy goal of the Jewish establishment in America over the past fifty years has been full integration into society—and assimilation and intermarriage are just logical consequences of that policy. Imagine how you would react if some Lutheran group sent out flyers saying:
DON
’
T MARRY JEWS
. The whole community would be up in arms. The Jews in the United States today are just getting what they always wanted.”