Book Review

Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora. Ed. by Nancy L. Green. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. viii, 256 pp. Cloth, $40.00, isbn 0-520-20127-2. Paper, $14.95, isbn 0-520-20128-0.)

While doing research a decade ago at the American Jewish Historical Society, I read the files of an ominously named but, for the most part, benevolently motivated organization, the Industrial Removal Office (IRO). Created in 1901 by mostly German-Jewish Americans, the iro tried to relocate eastern European Jewish immigrants, on an individual basis, from the New York region to smaller towns and cities in the United States. By 1922, at its closure, it had helped transplant more than 75,000 mainly unemployed persons to nearly 1,700 small Jewish communities in every state of the Union and Canada.	1
The immigrant correspondence contained in these files was rich enough in institutional history, and even more so in social and cultural history, to be the foundation for a book. And now we have it—Robert A. Rockaway's superb selection of some forty letters, bracketed by an illuminating introduction that supplies a coherent historical background and a sensitive epilogue that explores the mixed motives of the German-Jewish benefactors.	2
The massive immigration of east European Jews into the United States at the turn of the century presented the fairly well established German Jews with a number of problems, including the economic burden of so many needy coreligionists and, more important, the potential for an increasing anti-Semitism, connected to such alien ways of the "Russians" as Yiddish, Orthodox Judaism, and socialism. The hinterland, it was thought, would Americanize the "greenhorns" more quickly than the larger eastern cities that were densely populated with immigrants and permeated with Jewish culture. Dispersal would also, it was hoped, help ward off serious attempts to restrict immigration.	3
By the end of the first year of operation, over 1,500 persons had been relocated, and after more than twenty years, mostly under the able direction of David Bressler, tens of thousands had found new homes all over the United States. Bressler received many letters of appreciation. But as other carefully selected, detailed, poignant, sometimes humorous, and always representative letters in this anthology show, the results of the IRO effort were mixed. Many immigrants faced lost or delayed baggage, furniture, or tools and trouble over unpaid utility bills. There were also complaints from local committees about being overburdened and about mismatched needs and skills. And there were as many complaints from relocated immigrants about poor conditions and lack of opportunity.	4
Many of these immigrants wanted to return to New York, but it became clear soon after the establishment of the IRO that the vast majority of Jewish immigrants in the eastern cities would never even think about leaving the Northeast. The ethnic enclaves of the great cities provided anchors for the newly uprooted. Urban Jewish neighborhoods supplied familiarity, friends, relatives, synagogues, and kosher food. The ghetto meant Yiddishkeit, or a Jewish way of life. "If I were [still] in New York," said a recent immigrant earning a decent living in the South, "I could go to the Yiddish theater in the evenings, hear a lecture, visit people whose conversation I enjoy . . . in short, after working hours, be a man."	. . .