Ch. 4 - Joe and Me: Two Generations on the Jewish Left
Below is chapter 4 from Ken’s forthcoming book, How Did I Get Here? A Memoir of the Baby Boom Generation.
We sat at Joe’s kitchen table arguing, with my tape recorder ready for another interview session. Joe had called our publisher to demand that they replace me with another writer for his autobiography. Mortified and exasperated, I flung pencils at the wall as we argued.
We were fighting about an attack on Ukrainian peasants. By Jews. In 1918, sixty years ago.
I was a young historian who delighted in the stories of my 79-year-old subject. I thought this astonishing tale had to be in our book. But Joe resisted. He was adamant.
Yossel, Joe, was born in 1899 in a Ukrainian shtetl, Stanislavchik. During the Russian Revolution, he was a hot-blooded teenager. Defying parents, he and his pals defended their shtetl with guns in those years of marauding armies, pogroms, and feuds with young Ukrainians from the nearby peasant village.
In one of our interviews Joe recounted how, at 19, he had joined a Jewish detachment of the Red Army on a mission to fight a bandit group threatening a nearby shtetl. They routed the bandits, who were local Ukrainian peasants. And then they assaulted the nearby Ukrainian village – robberies, beatings, and more. I wanted the astonishing details, but Joe refused to tell more.
A Jewish pogrom on Ukrainian peasants! I never had heard of such a thing. I thought, “Here is an extraordinary event that reveals Joe and his times.” I included it in our chapter on World War I and the Russian Revolution.
“Take it out,” Joe told me, after reading the first draft. “It will be bad for the Jewish people.”
“But it happened,” I argued. “Jews also can do terrible things in war and revolution.”
“I will not be part of a blood bilbul,” Joe responded, voice rising.
This was a fierce objection. A “blood bilbul,” I had learned from Joe, is a monstrous antisemitic libel, like the medieval claim revived by the Nazis that Jews used the blood of gentiles to make matse at Passover.
“But this story is true,” I thought, still arguing. But Joe proclaimed he would not provide fuel for enemies of the Jewish people.
We debated it again and again over our years of work, as Joe discovered that I kept the story in chapter 2 through successive drafts, despite his repeated objections. I thought this Jewish atrocity was extraordinary and I hated cleansing it from our book.
Joe’s complaint to the publisher came as our oral history autobiography approached publication in 1981. Joe called our publisher, a university press, when he realized I would not give up on including that story.
In the end, we agreed on a compromise solution. The Jewish attack on the Ukrainians remained in the chapter, without any description, as a rumor Joe heard on the train returning home: “We gave the bastards a taste of their own.”
Now, over 40 years after publication, I’ve stopped wondering what actually happened in that Ukrainian village and whether we had to include it in our book. My inspiring encounters with Joe, writing his big life story, seem long ago, even that ferocious argument over telling the truth in our book and protecting the reputation of the Jewish people. But in those days, including that story had been important to me, important enough to defy Joe and argue him to our compromise.
* * *
The book was titled Joe Rapoport, the Life of a Jewish Radical. It told Joe’s momentous life story: growing up in Stanislavchik, World War I and the Russian Revolution, a perilous 1919 emigration journey to America, his New York City experience in the 1920s through the 1940s as a knit goods shop worker and left-wing labor organizer, and then his years in northern California as a chicken rancher and community activist. Joe explained his 1923 conversion to socialism, a conversion that guided him for the decades ahead, as having “a double edge – the participation in the class struggle against exploitation of man by man and the strong feeling for solving the Jewish problem by humanizing society.” Through Joe’s autobiography, I wanted to tell the epic tale of America’s twentieth century East European immigrant Jewish left wing movement.
We met in 1974 at an American Civil Liberties Union picnic in Sonoma County, 35 miles north of San Francisco. I was working on an oral history of the once famous Petaluma Jewish chicken ranching community. I was taping immigrants, their children and grandchildren, chronicling the Americanization of an immigrant community over generations. Age 30, I wanted to understand those grandchildren, my own baby boom generation: where we came from and where we were heading. Joe opened another door into that history, from the immigrant left wing perspective.
From our first discussions I realized that Joe had walked in the pages of the American history I was studying as a graduate student at UC Berkeley. He had been a skilled knit goods worker and a Communist Party union organizer, a grass roots leader in the great industrial union organizing drives of the 1930s. He arrived in California in 1949 after having been blackballed from knit goods work in New York City during the McCarthy era. Joe began anew in postwar Sonoma County where he built a prosperous hen ranch. Still a socialist radical, he became an activist, involved in every local social justice campaign, inside and outside his Jewish chicken ranching community, whether fighting McCarthyism, advocating for small farmers, working for racial integration, opposing the Vietnam War, or supporting a local Native American cultural center.
I was dazzled by how Joe and his generation, as a matter of course, placed their lives in the great currents of twentieth century world history. Joe’s recollections of his tiny shtetl became an epic narrative of Jewish life under the Tsar, in revolution, and then under the Soviet system. Joe’s tale of romance with Shaiva, Sheba, his wife of over half a century, born in a neighboring shtetl, was a charming exposition on Old World continuities in his 1920s Brownsville Yiddish ghetto. His account of being a hand knitter morphed into the saga of immigrant class conflict and the movements to build trade unions and socialism. Describing the small Petaluma Jewish chicken ranching community, Joe portrayed postwar American national politics and social upheavals. Joe’s preoccupation with the Jewish people and the “insult” of antisemitism, his visits back to his shtetl in the Soviet Union, his journeys to Israel, mushroomed into the tales of twentieth century Jewish destinies as Soviet citizens, European Holocaust victims, Zionist pioneers in Palestine, and American socialist immigrants.
Joe knew that he and his generation had been actors on the world stage, participants in great events of the twentieth century. They had shaped the world. He was not surprised by my interest and interviews, then our oral history project to tape record his life story, and then our publication contract with a university press. Joe was ready for his historian. Me.
* * *
I was a doctoral student, studying the past and searching for my future. I had grown up in the old Jewish West Side of Chicago and the Jewish suburb Skokie, a grandson of East European immigrants in a middle class Jewish family. At the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s I had joined the student rebellion, casually discarding my plan for law school. In 1966 I headed straight to UC Berkeley for graduate study at the wellspring of the uprising.
While studying history in the Sixties, I thought I was making history through the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and the student movement. I met Joe in 1974 amidst the collapse of this upheaval. By then my baby boom generation was in retreat from radical politics and social movements to private life and “lifestyle,” with emerging new preoccupations: careers, earnings, consumption, and cultivation of self. But I was among many Sixties rebels who searched for alternative vocations. My plan was to become a free-lance radical historian. History is how I could explain what was happening.
I began visiting Petaluma in 1974 to interview immigrant Jewish chicken ranchers about their community. I began with my grandparents’ generation and the Yiddish immigrant world described in Irving Howe’s masterpiece World of Our Fathers. I was searching for a way of life and political values with more staying power than I had found in my conventional 1950s suburb or 1960s Berkeley style radicalism or the 1970s retreat to accumulating wealth and preoccupation with self.
I sought out Joe, as I had been drawn to the immigrant generation in his Petaluma Jewish community, looking for an historical anchor. It was not just nostalgia for the Yiddish speaking old-timers. The consistency of Joe’s recognition of injustice, faith in socialism, and steady participation in social movements stood in sharp contrast to the ephemeral character of my generation’s rebellion in the Sixties. In Joe and his radical Jewish immigrant movement I saw continuity of politics, culture, and comrades over half a century. I needed to understand these Jewish long-distance runners on the American left.
In 1977, Ph.D. degree in hand and a professor job in reach, I swerved off my path. I ditched my academic career. Instead of becoming a professor at some faraway sleepy university, I decided to remain in the Bay Area. I already was deep into writing a popular history of the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranching community over generations, my own account of East European Jewish history in the United States. Now I added writing Joe’s autobiography, the story of East European Jewish radicalism in the United States. I staked my future on writing these two books about Jewish chicken ranchers.
I was fascinated by Joe as a genuine rebel, by temperament as well as politics, a rebel in his bones from childhood, long before he encountered a knitting machine or chicken ranching. Take his bar mitzvah. In defiance of his family’s Jewish orthodoxy, Joe did not learn the Torah reading for the ceremony. That day Joe’s father told him, “You put me to shame before the entire shtetl. I do not believe you will say kaddish when I die.”
I found this incident more troubling than the Jewish pogrom against the Ukrainians. I was a dutiful son as well as a sixties rebel, with a rocky relationship with my own father, and I puzzled over how Joe could include that description of his father’s public disappointment with him in our book, for everyone to read. I would have been ashamed, and I wondered if Joe was embarrassed. But I knew the answer.
This was Joe’s proud lifelong character: rejection of his family’s Jewish orthodoxy; armed resistance to anti-Semites attacking Stanislavchik; lone teenage emigration from the Ukraine to the United States; refusal to work in his brother’s New York store; determination to become a hand knitter and a union activist; expulsion from English language school because of his classroom defense of jailed socialist leader Eugene Debs. Coming of age, Joe chose the paths of independence, resisting injustice, challenging authority, and sticking to principle. He had been truly revolutionary, eager to create a new world like his Jewish immigrant generation.
As an unencumbered Berkeley radical, a free-lance historian without a job, with my sixties movement gone and my future unclear, I gravitated to Joe’s seamless blend of tradition with rebellion. Joe’s decades-long devotion to political principle and organizational action was steady and solid. His radical Rank-and-File Group of knit goods activists, formed in the 1920s, experienced with strikes and organizing, were ready in the 1930s when the great union organizing drives became possible. Through a lifetime of social conflicts and personal dislocations, Joe had a half-century marriage, a sturdy Petaluma bungalow purchased through his hard-earned success as a hen rancher, and local respect as a longstanding community activist who built alliances across the political spectrum. Over decades in movements for social change, Joe had maintained ties with family, friends, and comrades that dated back to Stanislavchik, New York knit goods shops, and Sonoma County chicken ranches. He could summon wisdom from the Prophets, Ukrainian folklore, and Yiddish literature, along with the teachings of Marx and Lenin, to discuss American life.
I adopted Joe, with his large long fervent commitments, solidity, patience, stubbornness, and integrity, as a grandfather away from home. He was my model of a political activist who knew himself, established his place, and welcomed me in. Over years of interviews, my tape recorder and I became fixtures in Joe’s home.
The back cover of our book jacket pictures Joe and me working in his tiny kitchen, tape recording equipment and papers spread on the table, Joe pointing a finger as I listened attentively. I camped at that cramped table for years, hundreds of hours, absorbed in our spacious friendship: questioning, listening, arguing, discussing our manuscript, enjoying corned beef and cabbage meals prepared by Sheba, meeting their friends, and downing shots of Joe’s vodka to celebrate our project.
Joe showed me pictures of his life in the United States. My favorites were of Joe and Sheba on a 1927-1928 cross-country road trip to explore America. Joe had been my age, and I thought about my 1960s explorations of the country, which did not measure up to this. Sheba had been a stunning young beauty, and she had married Joe to avoid problems crossing the American heartland. Their magnificent Chevrolet touring car was solid on the gravel roads, with a top that came down and a front seat that converted into a bed, the starting point for conversations with locals as they explored their new country.
Joe found knitting work in Los Angeles, where they joined other young Jewish immigrant radicals who sang Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish folksongs as they hiked. Joe was a crucial new vote in the factional contest between Fosterites and Lovestonites for control of the local Communist Party. He dove into the local labor battles to organize needle trades shops and joined the campaign to free Tom Mooney, a labor leader who was convicted on false evidence. They explored the mountains and deserts, and savored L.A.’s miles of orange blossoms. They tried vegetarianism. Joe and Sheba, in the way of their radical immigrant Jewish generation, emerged in those pictures as young adventurers, at least until they returned to New York and the challenges of the Great Depression.
Across our years of interviews, Joe startled me with his fresh indignation over terrible wrongs – the blood bilbuls. Along with the Nazi propaganda that Jews feasted on the blood of Christian babies, Joe still spoke with anger about others: the American government execution of the Rosenbergs for atomic spying; the Soviet claim of a Jewish doctors plot on the life of Stalin; Irving Howe’s charge of Jewish Communist Party gangsterism against Jewish socialists in the 1920s battles for control of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. I wondered whether my own outrage would continue over the injustices I fought.
I listened in silence when Joe denounced Hannah Arendt for Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she criticized European Jewish leaders for their role in the Holocaust, for their cooperation in the destruction of their own people. Joe did not name it a blood bilbul, but he saw it as “ammunition for the enemies of the Jewish people” and “with all my heart I condemn those opinions.” He explained the centuries long persecution faced by European Jews, the historic Jewish defensive strategies of passivity and cooperation, the overwhelming power and cunning of the Nazis’ extermination campaign. This was about the loss of his Ukrainian family and childhood friends. To those who criticized the Jewish people for walking into the gas chambers, Joe insisted, “You never know what you will do until you actually feel the knife at your throat.” Joe, I thought with admiration, had discovered his own answers to that question. Never having been tested like this, I had nothing to say.
Joe’s ferocity included violence. As a teenager, he had fought in gun skirmishes to protect his shtetl, defending “the life and honor of the Jewish people,” and I believed he had killed opposing combatants. In New York, as part of the “apparatus of young workers who could handle themselves,” Joe had fought as a young Communist Party militant in the 1920s, “to defend our movement from the labor terror of the social democratic leadership of the ILGWU.” Viewing the postwar ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, remembering that Jewish armed battle with the Nazis, he explained, “It gave me a feeling of protest against the destruction of my people and a pride in our heroic resistance.” Older yet, Joe admired the military prowess of the young Israelis he met in the 1960s and 1970s, with a gun in hand and “no timid expression in their faces.” “When he has a gun and when he joins together with others,” Joe insisted, with palpable pride, “the Jewish soldier ranks among the best fighters in the world.”
These were the views of a man who had burst out of the humiliations of Jewish shtetl life under the Tsar. This was part of making history for Joe and his generation. I was a grandchild of this immigrant experience, far removed from violent persecution or armed resistance. I was from a peaceful 1950s American suburb. Later I became politically radical, but with a pacific inclination in opposition to the Vietnam War. My pencil-flinging tirade, in our dispute over Joe’s complaint about me to our publisher, was as close to violence as I’d get. Armed fighting? Unimaginable. Late at night, transcribing our interviews, thinking about Joe’s fierceness, I’d ponder, “Is this my historical tradition?”
I urged Joe to rethink his beliefs in the light of many unexpected historical developments. He had long questioned his support for the 1920s and 1930s twists and turns of the Soviet Union, the Comintern, the Profintern, and American communist organizations. Joe still agonized over having become a permanent left wing opposition in the 1930s and 1940s knit goods local of the ILGWU. Joe and his Communist Party comrades had been hostile critics of the socialist union leadership, who perpetually Red-baited them as Communists following orders from Moscow. It was an effective argument. Their influence dwindled: “Today I question [our] oppositional tactics…”
Through our taped discussions, Joe reconsidered his decades-long belief that Soviet communism would end Tsarist constrictions on east European Jewish life and solve “the Jewish question.” He recounted his own path, a gradual troubled recognition of Soviet antisemitism and the Soviet terrors faced by his own family and friends who remained in the Ukraine. Joe also re-examined the Communist Party’s long opposition to Zionism, embraced the creation of Israel, insisted upon his right to criticize Israeli policy toward Palestinians, and criticized young American Jewish radicals who supported justice for Palestinians at the expense of their own Jewish people.
Joe’s rethinking was deepest in response to the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress speech by Khrushchev, denouncing the tyranny of Stalin, prompting Joe to vow never again to follow a nation, leader, or organization over the dictates of his conscience. I admired Joe’s refusal to clutch static Stalinist ideologies in enclosed groups of Communist Party believers, isolated from American and European political and social change. He continued his radical political work with fresh ideas and new allies in postwar Sonoma County.
Joe refused to discuss his long membership in the Communist Party, a mysterious ordered world, far away from my undisciplined New Left of the Sixties. I thought he was justifiably cautious, having lived through years of American government persecution of Party members, particularly in the McCarthy era, just 20 years ago, when the FBI had been monitoring the Petaluma Jewish community along with radicals across the country. But I also suspected, after my stubbornness about including the story of the Jewish pogrom on Ukrainian peasants, that Joe did not trust me with an inside account of his Communist Party membership. Or perhaps the Party record contained too many difficult ideological positions and personal choices that I wanted to explore and he did not.
It was easy for me, a historian without a movement, to encourage Joe to reconsider his lifelong political commitments, for publication in our book. I had not participated in those decades of struggles. My background was suburban middle class and my radicalism was university based, born a few years previous in the free-wheeling now-disappeared Sixties. I was no activist organizer with decades long comrades, organizations, and publications who would hold me accountable for revisionist views.
My writing commitment was to tell a good story about the deeds of the immigrant Jewish left. That included a deep look into their contradictions, misunderstandings, and failures. As I pressed Joe in our interviews, I bridled when I thought he was bending his experience to reflect well on the left and the Jews, as I thought he was doing with that story of the Jewish program on Ukrainian peasants, and then we’d argue over how to tell his story. But I also knew his rethinking was profound and balanced. I doubted that I would be so self-questioning when the time came for me to reckon up my lifelong values and actions.
After our book was published, I realized I had been blind to Joe’s experience as an immigrant, an outsider in American culture, a Jew forever in exile, an alien. Joe and Sheba surprised me in 1982 with their passionate admiration for a new film: “ET, the Extra Terrestrial.” This blockbuster science fiction movie was about an alien creature marooned on earth, befriended by a lonely boy. For me it was a sentimental extraterrestrial buddy story. Joe and Sheba thought the movie was a breakthrough in American attitudes toward outsiders – immigrants. I was astonished by their excitement about the movie’s message of acceptance of strangers.
I always had viewed Joe and Sheba as comfortably integrated into American life, whether it was politics or work or neighbors. I had met their gentile friends. I had seen that Joe was widely respected in Sonoma County. Oddly, I had assumed that, like me, Joe had never experienced American ethnic difference, as if he too had grown up in a postwar Jewish American suburb. This discussion of “ET,” almost a decade after we’d met, provoked my first recognition that Joe had a deep feeling of displacement and apartness as an immigrant. I remembered that he had alluded to it with his description of first visiting Israel in 1963: “I had a feeling of return to my own history.” Wrapped in my own cultural comfort, admiring his ease as a political activist and his achievements in Sonoma County, I had never thought to question Joe about his estrangement from America.
With the approach of publication, Joe and I had to resolve a critical issue about his Jewishness: the book’s title. I wanted to name Joe as a “Jewish Radical.” Sheba thought it should be just “Radical” without identifying him as Jewish. She believed that organizers like Joe were internationalists who stood for working class solidarity across national, ethnic, and religious differences; that Joe had fought for the liberation of all workers, not just Jews; and that he had opposed Jewish bosses, Jewish social democrats, and Jewish national separatists (Zionists). I argued that Joe should be identified as Jewish because he grew up in a shtetl, spoke Yiddish as his native tongue, fought antisemitism, worked largely with Jewish immigrant workers in New York, was an activist among the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranchers, associated himself with a Jewish immigrant radical movement, and had a lifelong preoccupation with the worldwide fate of the Jewish people. I thought Joe should be true to his Jewish identity and experience. And, like our publisher, I wanted “Jewish” in the title because I thought it would attract Jewish readers and sell more books.
This argument between Sheba and me – our own reprise of decades of European and American debates over class and ethnicity amongst Jewish socialists, nationalists, and communists – simmered for years, polite and intense. Sheba, I thought, was less flexible than Joe in her views of their lifelong radical commitments. But, reflecting on Joe’s New York organizing work with American, Italian, German and Portuguese workers, with the Grange and the NAACP and the United Farm Workers in postwar Sonoma County, I also recognized that Sheba had a formidable position. Joe was Jewish, but he also was an internationalist.
To my relief, Joe ultimately agreed with me. The autobiography’s title named Joe as a “Jewish Radical.”
* * *
The 1981 publication of Joe Rapoport, the Life of a Jewish Radical was a huge success for Joe and me.
A left-wing New York Jewish magazine, Jewish Currents, had published an excerpt several years earlier: Joe’s high spirited, reflective account of his first strike in 1923. That preview article caught the attention of Joe’s New York City comrades. Several became volunteer editors of our manuscript; our project now included debates with an insistent chorus of distant Yiddish voices from the East. The book had become their story too, and Joe returned to New York to celebrate publication. I imagined small gatherings of aged Yiddish radicals with quiet toasts and shared remembrances of great labor battles.
Joe’s former trade union foes also figured large. “They were pushing us off the historical record,” Joe once complained about his social democratic rivals from the 1930s, tenacious former Lovestonite Communists who won control of the ILGWU knit goods workers local. With our book, Joe enjoyed the triumph of the final say about the history of the knit goods workers union. Here, in an authoritative university press volume, with Joe’s picture on the cover, in a coat and tie like any self-respecting hand knitter, set against the background of a general strike flyer, was Joe’s account of twentieth century American unionism and the knit goods workers, including the contributions of Joe’s radical Rank-and-File Group. I was delighted to help Joe set straight the historical record of this obscure and revealing bygone struggle from the 1930s and 1940s.
I accomplished my personal goals too. Now an author, publication of the book vindicated my long preoccupation with the Petaluma chicken ranchers, far from an academic career. Here was the experience of a unique Jewish immigrant radical with a colorful instructive tale spanning continents and decades of social justice movements. Joe had led a life of organizing in shops and communities. He had contributed to major social achievements from the 1920s through the 1970s. He had an enduring belief in socialism and American democratic traditions. He offered deep insights from hard-earned lessons of his own accomplishments and failures. Through my interviews with Joe, I had written this compelling life story.
Our book offered a message to my own baby boom generation of left wingers, the New Left. Joe delivered a blistering critique of our politics. He had worked closely in the 1960s and 1970s with this new generation in the anti-war movement and electoral politics in Sonoma County. He was more likely to be on a campus collaborating with students over demonstrations than on a shop floor with workers struggling for labor and economic improvements. Joe welcomed the idealism of the young activists. But he criticized the new generation’s movement as a romanticized rebellion of the middle-class young against parents, the war, and a powerful capitalist system.
This was a left-wing family dispute, often between generations of Jewish radicals. Joe denounced demands by young radicals for separate left wing parties and revolutionary action, like what he saw with the Weather Underground in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He regarded the left extremism and violence as a fear of relying on American democratic traditions and a failure to recognize that the Sixties was not a revolutionary period. He criticized the New Left’s lack of class theory and strategy to reach working people. Joe was frustrated by the young radicals’ ignorance of his American history: working class struggles over generations to build unions, establish workplace rights, achieve security for unemployment and disability and old age, and win an improved working class standard of living, including better homes, new cars, and, he insisted, color televisions. Without recognizing the long working class movement for improved standard of living and dignity through union organization, Joe believed the New Left could not succeed. “You cannot reach the moon without an elevator,” he insisted. “You cannot build socialism without a broad movement of working people.”
Joe excoriated New Left historians who criticized the left wing of the 1930s, Joe’s left wing, for not advancing socialism. He insisted those times had required a popular front with non-socialists to end the Depression, build unions and social welfare protections, and fight fascism; that these were the greatest accomplishments of the American labor movement. “There is a Yiddish expression for such people,” Joe said of these New Left historian critics, frazn-shiser, phrase-shooter. They use revolutionary rhetoric that is not based on reality.”
It was strong stuff, directed at my own generation of New Left historians, and I was excited to include it in the book. Joe and I had debated the New Left over our years of taping. I had defended our radical commitments, even as privileged children who grew up in middle class comfort. I had defended our accomplishments resisting the Vietnam War, supporting racial justice, and challenging social conventions, often in the face of working class opposition. I had questioned Joe’s allegiance to the local Democratic Party and whether he differed from liberal reformers. But in the end, I thought Joe’s criticism of the abortive Sixties upheaval, my movement, was accurate and his defense of the 1930s left was persuasive. And as a writer, I welcomed Joe’s provocations of my generation. I looked forward to debates ahead: New Left criticism of our book and then our rejoinders.
We had a publication party in my hometown Berkeley. The house was filled with many generations on the left. And there was Joe, pensive in his steel-rimmed glasses, dapper in his sports coat and western string tie, a self-taught worker intellectual, a farmer intellectual, a shtetl boy who embraced the modern world, with this autobiography as a megaphone for his ideas. He delivered a speech on the movements he had been part of and the challenges ahead to build socialism. With Joe, it always was a critical examination of the past and an optimistic gaze to the future.
I was beside Joe, Sixties style with hair frizzy and sideburns long, big grin all afternoon, with a talk on the importance of Joe’s experience for my generation. I read a favorite passage from our book, a story from the 1936 knit goods workers general strike, about the struggle to organize a shop, the New York Knitting Mills, where Joe took a swing at a scab crossing a militant picket line, and, amidst chanting and yelling and falling glass, police and goons set on him:
“The pickets came to my rescue, especially the girls. They dared more, expecting to be treated less rough than the men. One of my best friends on the organizational committee, a class conscious working girl, Irene Mason, started to pull me away by the tie! She almost choked me to death! I told her later, ‘If I have such friends, who needs the gangsters?’
“We were arrested. The most militant – those who are in the forefront and give direction – were always arrested, and in the process we were not so gently handled. But from the picket line to the police station, we sang our militant songs. We had a spirit of courage, a feeling of victory, even though we had to go through the fight and arrest. We were out of jail the next morning and back on the picket line. And when the strike ended, the New York Knitting Mills settled with the union.”
I was thrilled to read from our book to audiences. It was a language on paper that Joe and I had invented over years of debate. Joe spoke an eloquent Yiddishized English. I had grown up hearing Yiddish, and I celebrated the disappearing language, so at the outset I attempted to reproduce Joe’s Yiddish English dialect in our book. Joe, who had embraced modern Yiddish culture as a young radical convert in the 1920s Pitkin Avenue Jewish Cultural Club, now, half a century later, considered Yiddish a cultural straight jacket that isolated his Jewish immigrant radical movement from American life. He wanted me to write his story in a correct English that would be clear to readers and not subject to condescension. Over years of negotiating the language of drafts, our manuscript’s prose gravitated toward conventional English, shaped and flavored by Joe’s dialect. In the end Joe was satisfied, and I thought our prose perfectly expressed him for an American audience. Those words, the syntax and rhythms, became familiar music in my mind, a joy for me to chant aloud.
From public appearances to private toasts, Joe and I celebrated our collaboration to tell the world his saga. I’m confident we gave away more copies of the book than the publisher sold. The autobiography was widely read, at least among our friends in northern California, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, the circles we most cared about. It was well reviewed in California and Jewish and academic newspapers, magazines, and journals. It was not reviewed in any New Left publication.
Joe and I did many speaking presentations together in the Bay Area. Hanging above my desk today is a bold red poster advertising one of those events, at Joe’s own nearby Sonoma State University: “Oral History as Autobiography. Joe Rapoport and Kenneth Kann. The Narrator and His Oral Historian.”
I still look at that poster with pleasure. Yes, proudly, I was Joe’s historian.
* * *
My life transformed after the publication of Joe Rapoport. It changed in ways I never would have predicted in 1974 when Joe and I launched our project and began our friendship.
I decided to change my career. My royalties from Joe Rapoport had been swallowed up years ago in a small publication advance. I could not find a publisher for my next book on the Petaluma chicken rancher community. My bridges with the academic world had disappeared during my years-long devotion to chicken rancher history, and the university teaching market had contracted. The prosperous Sixties were gone, when universities had been expanding and exciting, driving the national debates on war, race, and democracy. I had expected to join those debates with publication of Joe’s life story.
Seeing no direction left as a historian, I enrolled in law school and in 1986 became an attorney. I married and we had a daughter. I bought a San Francisco house and enrolled my daughter in private school. Through a massive effort over many years, I remade myself from a Berkeley free-lance New Left historian to an ambitious, economically comfortable litigator – a late addition to the baby boom generation exodus from Sixties radicalism.
My transformation contrasted with two major work displacements in Joe’s life. Mechanization and McCarthyism ousted him from the hand knitter trade after the war. And in the 1960s the development of a national corporate poultry industry forced him out of family chicken ranching. Joe faced both challenges through organizing others to resist, and through reliance on his skills as a hand worker to change vocation. But the world of the Jewish immigrant working class had largely disappeared when I faced my own displacement as an academic. There was no organized resistance for me to join.
I encountered fierce employment competition within my own baby boom generation when I changed careers to law. And I was ready for it. I had middle class advantages – extensive education, family resources, two previous generations of assimilation and social mobility – that Joe never had enjoyed or sought in America. I used those advantages for a solo departure from my historian career, leaving behind a feeble part time university teachers union to a new paying profession as an attorney. I relied on my own training, skills, and know-how to establish myself in the hyper-competitive world of law practice.
Joe knew I became an attorney, but I never told him how my legal career later shifted. I took a new law firm position in 1990, defending large corporations and government agencies. I was well paid for the first time. I enjoyed working with the people who operated and defended those institutions, and they appreciated my legal skills.
But I felt uncomfortable about it. Joe never had compromised like this – employers often fired him or would not hire him because of his union activities. He declined invitations to become a union bureaucrat, to dip into the ILGWU shmaltstop, lard bucket, and he refused opportunities to become a knit goods manufacturer. Joe moved cross country and turned to raising chickens in California rather than give in to McCarthy-era blackballing in New York City, even though “It was not a marriage of love between the chicken and me.” How could I explain to Joe, my model of an honorable life of working class social responsibility, that I now represented the bosses?
Joe died in 1992, age 93, a year before I finally published the story of the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranchers. With this second book, I had the pleasure of seeing Joe’s words on paper again, now among other narrators from his Petaluma chicken rancher community. It included Joe’s scorching critique of the insularity of his own left wing Petaluma Yiddish radical group: “…I was a stranger to our progressive Jewish movement by not declaring ‘Yidish iz loshn koydesh, Yiddish is a holy language,’ like it was said about Hebrew in the Old Country.” Joe had taken me to one of the last meetings of his Petaluma Jewish Cultural Club, to witness it at dissolution, the end of a political culture, Joe’s own radical Yiddish culture. Joe knew I understood and would include it in my book to be remembered, exactly what I did.
I wondered how Joe would have viewed that new book. I thought he would have approved the sympathetic portrait of the linke, the community’s immigrant left wing, through their twentieth century achievements and tribulations. Joe would have agreed with my account of the next generation, the American children of the immigrants: their uneasy immigrant roots, hard-won prosperity and acceptance, and persisting ambivalences toward American life. And I think he would have been curious about the story of the Petaluma Jewish community’s third generation, my generation, with comfortable American childhoods, Sixties rebellion, challenges to parents, nostalgia for radical grandparents, lack of faith in religion or politics, search for meaning in our own psyches rather than in social justice struggles, and pathways open to American prosperity. They were far from how Joe and his generation came of age in the 1920s with battles to build unions, Communist Party politics, and Yiddish culture.
Much of my understanding of that community had come through years of discussions with Joe. But Joe was an idealist with faith in a socialist future. My Petaluma Jewish story presented community breakdown and deracination over generations, with uncertain prospects for Jewish continuity or for a cohesive Jewish community ahead.
I continued to see Sheba after Joe died, and those visits were comforting. She began a project to reissue Joe Rapoport in her own edition that would have a title without the word “Jewish,” along with other ideological corrections. Sheba was just the determined person to complete such a scheme, and I watched her with curiosity, apprehension, and grudging admiration. Despite my misgivings, I helped her. How could I refuse? But then Sheba passed away, and I lost my last living link to Joe.
I regretted that Joe was not around two decades later when my daughter Julia came of age as a labor organizer and Occupy Wall Street demonstrator. Joe would have been elated to hear Julia and the voices of a new millennial generation of radicals. He would have appreciated Occupy’s exuberant appropriation of public space and galvanizing call for re-distribution of wealth that transformed the national political dialogue. He would have welcomed Julia’s efforts to build an alliance between Occupiers and sympathetic local trade unions. He might have recognized a subterranean stream of American Jewish radicalism bursting out again in the Occupy encampments. And he certainly would have provided comradely criticism of Occupy’s anarchic ideology and organization. Occupy was not built to endure, while Joe was all about patience and persistence of the left.
Most of all, I wished I had the opportunity to tell Joe that I resolved my career dilemma when I left private law practice to work as an attorney for the California courts. I found a job that paid well and also allowed me to build an impartial, accessible California justice system. Of course, I was in management, one of the bosses. And I was not creating socialism, building a movement, or making history like Joe. But, by working to establish a strong justice system, I was promoting my lofty democratic ideals from the Sixties.
When I took that job, I heard Joe’s voice of approval.
* * *
Two months before he died, on a visit with me and my wife and daughter, Joe took me aside in his study to tell me about a recent dream. It was urgent. It was so real. And immediately he was absorbed in reciting the dream, as if we were sitting at his kitchen table 15 years earlier with my tape recorder reels spinning.
Joe was traveling by foot with a tribe of Indians, Native American Indians in traditional garb, his local political allies. They were guiding him on a long journey, moving fast and light, stepping high. They scampered atop high mountains, across broad plains, and over vast seas. This trek ended at Joe’s Ukrainian shtetl.
Joe found himself with his Native American escorts on a hill above Stanislavchik, looking out at the home he had left over 70 years ago, just as he had seen it the morning he departed for America. Joe described the dream Stanislavchik as he had recalled the real one to me when we began taping his life story: the red clay tile roofs of the shtetl homes, the thatched straw roofs of the surrounding peasant village, the towering steeples of the two churches, flowering acacia trees surrounding the town, checkerboard peasant fields, and the vast lands of the pomeshchik, the landlord, all set in the valley below. We had started Joe’s autobiography with this picture of home that never left him.
I thought I had long ago heard everything Joe had to say, but he astonished me again with this vision of his life’s end: this epic journey home, this mixing of his American life and Native American political allies with his Ukrainian origins. Joe was an extraordinary member of an extraordinary generation, a rebellious generation with a tenacious hold on their past. Even as Joe had charted a new course and built a future for coming generations, he held tightly to his history, to his people and places and deeds in the Old World and the New World. I saw it all in that noble dream journey with those Native American Indian comrades guiding him home to Stanislavchik.
At 80, I’m past Joe’s age when I met him over forty-five years ago as a young historian with a tape recorder. Now I appreciate my inspired judgment in finding Joe and my great fortune in knowing him. Joe showed me a life of conviction and integrity, bonds with people, and dedication to social justice. He understood the historical significance of the life he made, the movements he joined, and the world they built. Hearing Joe’s life story, discussing and arguing it with him, writing it, and celebrating with Joe, I found the history I was seeking.
Yet my own path led away from the immigrant Jewish working class, Jewish trade unionism, and Jewish radicalism. Joe was an important part of that history, the history I adopted as my own. But I traveled with my generation far from that history to acceptance in America, middle class accomplishment and material comfort, bland liberalism and vague progressivism.
It’s a sociological commonplace, this assimilation of the grandchildren of the radical Jewish immigrants into American life, with faint political and cultural remnants enduring from that great generation. But, living through that transformation, at the end, at the assimilation of my generation into American life, at my own assimilation, I am surprised. Even with my long search for my history, even with my adoption and remembrance of Joe’s history, I had become just another middle class American, one who knows a lot of history.