Who Owns History?

Thinking more about our discussion on Tuesday, and having read this New York Times article and the reactions to it, I want to explore the topic of “ownership” of the Holocaust a little more.  I am increasingly frustrated with the point of view that any one group should “own” history. It is critical that we respect those who lived through traumatic events, and those who are still affected by them today.  These survivors and descendants deserve the chance to tell their story and have their voices heard.  However, they do not “own” history.

The centrality of Jews in the story of Auschwitz and the Holocaust must remain.  However, efforts to overhaul the exhibitions at Auschwitz in order to serve a more educational purpose are a natural evolution.  Critical sites like these should not become historical footnotes of interest to small, directly affected groups.  Rather, they should share their lessons with the world.

Shared authority is one of our guiding concepts as public historians.  While we usually look at it from the perspective of museum professionals needing to give up some of their control, we shouldn’t forget that shared authority works both ways.  This concept also means that the “owners” of history also need to be less protective of their story, and allow it to be told in a way that will be instructive to a broader audience.

Up Close and Personal

I get emotional every time I read a Holocaust survivor’s memoir, watch the movie Life is Beautiful, or view Holocaust themed works of art. Beyond the inevitable tears, my immediate reaction to stories about the Holocaust includes anger, disillusionment, and the realization that I can never truly understand the horror that millions of people experienced. Because of this, I was surprised when I did not cry during my 2005 visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in Oświęcimiu, Poland. Instead, I remember nervously laughing with my undergraduate classmates as I searched for, and failed to find, an emotional connection to the site.

Photo by Logaritmo, November 28, 2007. Wikimedia Commons.

My experience in Poland made me realize that I feel more emotionally and intellectually connected to the past when reading a poignant Holocaust memoir, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, than I did when I stood among the stark, empty barracks of Auschwitz. A graphic novel that relies heavily on illustration to convey its themes, Maus is one of the most effective Holocaust narratives I have ever read. I attribute that effectiveness to Spiegelman’s unique choice of genre and to his decision to focus the book on the heartbreaking experience of one individual, his father Vladek Spiegelman, and his family.

The success of Maus rests on Spiegelman’s seamless merging of language and illustration. Taken together, they reveal an emotional current that would be impossible to convey with text alone. Words cannot adequately express Vladek’s wife Anja’s emotional and physical collapse when she learns her son had been killed or Anja’s father’s devastated expression when he realizes he is being taken to his death [1]. Spiegelman’s technique of vividly describing and illustrating his characters’ pain rapidly cements the reader’s emotional investment in the story. Once this is accomplished, Spiegelman can easily and effectively convey his chosen themes.

The novel’s combination of illustration and dialogue allows Spiegelman to subtly employ his themes rather than explicitly state them. This encourages a close and dynamic reading of the book, which increases its effectiveness as an educational tool. Without acknowledging it in the text, Spiegelman depicts Jewish people as mice, German Nazis as cats, Polish people as pigs, and Americans as dogs. Occasionally, the Jewish men and women must wear pig masks in public to conceal their identities and blend in with their Polish neighbors. This hoax, blatantly obvious to the reader, goes unnoticed by the Nazis and Poles [2]. Spiegelman’s illustrations allow him to creatively highlight the ridiculousness of Hitler’s discrimination against Jewish people and insistence that Jewish people were a distinct race [3].

Photo of Art Spiegelman, 2007. Photo by Chris Anthony Diaz, April 30, 2007. Wikimedia Commons.

By focusing on the experience of his own family, Spiegelman effectively conveys universal themes of loss, sacrifice, love, memory, and identity. When Vladek’s father climbs a fence to join his daughter and her four children as they are being sent to one of the camps, his sacrifice gives a face and a story to the unnamed men and women who made similar decisions [4]. It may seem contradictory, but I believe that Spiegelman’s narrow scope, which fosters the reader’s connection to the fate of Vladek and his extended family, ultimately reveals more about the Holocaust than a visit to an actual concentration camp. I argue that the public needs an anchor, something to grasp onto, if they are going to try to understand an inhumane and inexplicable event. Spiegelman’s accessible format and intimate portrait of one family provides that anchor. Auschwitz lacked that personal connection and perhaps that is why I did not shed tears or feel strong emotions while I was there.

When I returned from my college trip to Europe, my classmates and I designed a public exhibition to show our fellow students what we had learned about the Holocaust. My group constructed a Lego and wire model of Majdanek, a labor camp in Lublin, Poland that we had also visited. Looking back, I question that decision and wonder what concentration camps and other sites of atrocity can really teach us now. The stories aren’t there anymore. The stories are in autobiographies, oral histories and memoirs/graphic novels like Maus.

[1] Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. 1: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 122 and 115.

[2] Ibid., 64.

[3] Ibid., 4.

[4] Ibid., 91.

 

 

Bagels or Bust!

Where can you go to enjoy delicious Indian chicken tikka masala, Korean kimchi and Ethiopian kitfo all in the same place? The answer, not surprising to foodies, is most urban areas in the United States. Indians, Koreans, and Ethiopians are part of a new wave of immigrants to America, and, much like earlier Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, they are bringing their recipes with them and attracting an audience of Americans eager to experience new foods. Although these newest cuisines are still considered ethnic, many foods introduced by nineteenth and early twentieth-century immigrants have become staples of the American diet. This journey from ethnic speciality item to national culinary trend mirrors the move from exclusion to assimilation made by many American immigrant groups.

As I read the novel Bread Givers and encountered the Jewish community of New York’s Lower East Side, I considered the ways that Jewish foods and knowledge of Kosher law have entered mainstream American consciousness over the course of the twentieth century. The implications of this issue range from the lighthearted — where would we be without bagels and Hebrew National hot dogs? — to the more serious: how did Jewish Americans overcome the challenges of immigration to establish popular restaurants and delis?

Kosher Food Truck. Photo by Yanks9596, 2010. Wikimedia Commons.

Forshpeis! A Taste of the Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana, an exhibit that opened in 2006 at the National Museum of American Jewish History, addressed this topic and chronicled the ways that Jewish food influenced mainstream American tastes [1]. Considered together, Bread Givers and Forshpeis (which means appetizer) provide a multifaceted picture of the relationship that Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century had with their traditional foods and dietary restrictions.

Forshpeis! celebrated Jewish assimilation into American life and the contributions that Jewish people made to American cuisine. The exhibit closed when the museum opened its new building in 2010, but it maintains an online presence and objects from the exhibit remain on view at the museum. Its narrative is one of overcoming obstacles, where hard-working Jewish Americans win themselves a steady living and community respect by operating push carts, opening restaurants, and starting food manufacturing companies [2].

The exhibit also highlighted the popular American food products that Jewish families consumed and the recipes and ingredients they introduced to America as a way to feel more at home. Forshpeis! did not focus on Jewish men and women who abandoned their Jewish culinary traditions and Kosher law in order to succeed in America. Indeed, that idea runs contrary to its positive message of Jewish assimilation, economic success, cultural enrichment and the wonders of the Carnegie Deli [3].

Bread Givers tells a different, more complex, story. Protagonist Sara Smolinsky is a young Jewish girl living with her parents on the Lower East Side in the 1910s. At the age of seventeen, she runs from her overbearing father and forges a life on her own terms. She lives alone, must work to support herself, can only afford to spend 34 cents a day on food and drools over sausages that she can’t afford [4]. Likely due both to her dire economic position and her desire to assimilate into mainstream America, Sara does not keep a kosher home [4]. Focused solely on surviving and obtaining an American education, she does not observe the Jewish holidays or other Jewish food rituals. Sara sacrifices those elements of her Jewish identity so that she can pursue her personal dreams. This presents a story very different from Forshpeis!, which promotes the idea that Jewish Americans embraced and utilized their unique Jewish traditions to thrive in America. Sara’s rejection of her heritage allows her to succeed in an American academic and professional environment.

After completing her education, Sara moves back to New York City and becomes a teacher. When she asks her aging father to move in with her, he initially refuses because her home will, “contaminate his eating.”[5] Because Sara left her family and does not follow Jewish food laws, her father does not consider her Jewish [6]. By not keeping Kosher, did Sara forsake her Jewish identity? Would others in her community agree that she is not Jewish, or is that an opinion held by her father alone? Does Sara herself even care or is she satisfied knowing that she has achieved her goals? Most importantly, is her story and the story of others like her one that should be addressed by a commemorative exhibit like Forshpeis!?

[1] “Forshpeis! A Taste of the Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana,” http://www.nmajh.org/exhibitions/forshpeis/index.html

[2] “National Museum of American Jewish History Serves up Forshpeis! A Taste of the Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana,” http://bit.ly/fiT2an.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers, (New York: Persea Books, 2003), 165.

[5] Ibid., 295.

[6] Ibid., 293.



A Call for Empathy

The Huffington Post is a favorite blog of mine, so when in the course of my surfing I ran across Jeffrey Kaye’s February 25^th article, “Short Memories: Jews and Immigration,” I thought it was a really timely post given last week’s discussion.

Kaye’s thesis is simple but hardly without controversy, “that the Jewish immigration experience over the past century has more in common with present-day migrants than many Jews recognize or fully appreciate,” and that his fellow American Jews “would do well to draw a lesson from our own history and resist the temptation to scapegoat and demonize those whose crimes consist mainly of crossing political boundaries in search of better lives.” [1]

A Person is 60 Percent Water, the Rest is Blood and Iron (and Education)

All Sara Smolinsky wanted was to be a person.

For our Russian Jew immigrant protagonist of Bread Givers, it would take much of her formative years to figure out how to do that.  She had to become independent of the ways of her family, and the Old World, where “only men were people.” [1]  For Sara, she finds that her only path to achieving the independence necessary to being someone in America is through education.

The most striking issue with Sara was her insistence that, for most of her story, she was not yet a person at all.

This week 2/17

For those outside the class who are interested in joining the conversation online, this week we are reading:

Anzia Yezierska’s 1925 novel, Bread Givers, which tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, a Jewish immigrant girl struggling to make her way in the world.

Two articles from The Public Historian.

– Ruth J. Abram, “Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.” The Public Historian 29, No. 1 (Winter 2007): 59-76.

– Maggie Russell-Ciardi, “The Museum as a Democracy-Building Institution: Reflections on the Shared Journeys Program at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum,” The Public Historian 30, No. 1 (Winter 2008): 39-52.

And, finally, we are analyzing the content on the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s website.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Stereotypes even target babies!

“His Natural Inquiry”, Puck, Feb. 5, 1902. Courtesy of New York State Historical Association

Caption:
HIS NATURAL INQUIRY
Papa.-Undt dis leetle pig vent to der market-
Little Ikey.-How mooch did he make?

Cartoons featured in popular periodicals of the twentieth century often depicted stereotypes of immigrants. This one goes so far as to even impose the stereotype of the money-centric, materialistic Jew on a little baby. The cartoon exemplifies the eugenic ideology of the time which claimed certain races had inherent traits.

I Want to Live While I’m Yet Alive

It is my belief that the museum has the ability to present the stories of those marginalized within society. Through oral histories and material culture, the museum has an opportunity to give a voice to groups traditionally silenced. Among the most marginalized in American society, is the immigrant. Though Lady Liberty claimed she would cradle the world’s poor and tired huddled masses-America’s history is riddled with stories of dingy tenements, sweat shops, and moldy bread. It is important that these stories be remembered, for they offer insight into the social and economic fabric of American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, these stories convey lessons of tradition, poverty, and the search for an identity in a new world-stories that are still relevant to the contemporary immigrant struggle.

Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers tells the tale of Sara Smolinsky. This rebellious character is a Polish Jewish immigrant living in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. Sharing a tenement with a highly religious tyrannical father, a hardened but loving mother, and three older sisters, Sarah must learn to follow her own dreams of becoming a teacher, despite the many obstacles laid before her. The novel, a semi-autobiographical account of Yezierska, does a fine job at exploring the confines that class and gender place on this young Jewish immigrant.

However, if the reader wanted a more intimate idea of what Sarah’s world was like, then I suggest a visit to the Tenement Museum located on Manhattan’s Lower Eastside. This museum, a tenement building home to over 7,000 immigrant families was built in 1863. The museum’s mission is to “… [P]romote tolerance and historical perspective through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a gateway to America.” If interested in learning more about the Smolinskys’ life, I suggest the tour Piecing it all Together: Immigrants in the Garment Industry. This tour examines the life of two Jewish immigrant families living at 97 Orchard Street at the turn of the twentieth century.

As suggested earlier, a prominent theme throughout Bread Givers is the search for one’s identity. As Sarah begins to grow up in this new world, she begins to question traditions of the old world. She has a burning desire to go to college, believing that education can give her the wings to make her fly away from of her desolate life. Running away from home, she forsakes her parents and turns her back on her Jewish customs and religion. Her changing lifestyle highlights a phenomenon that occurred as Jewish immigrants made lives in America. Customs evolved, many Jews had inter-faith marriages, and level of religious practice varied. The identity of the Jew has evolved throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Jewish Museum of New York City, explored the concept of the evolving Jewish identity in their 2005-2006 exhibition, The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography. The exhibit examined the changing face of the American Jew, through the work of thirteen photographers and video artists. Though the exhibition is no longer on display, the exhibition catalog by Susan Chevlowe is available for purchase.

Museums are rich resources to explore the stories of the immigrant experience in America. They give a voice to the stories history textbooks often omit. Museum are essential in learning about the human experience.