Ch. 9 - The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma: Why Remember? Who Cares?
Below is chapter 9 from Ken’s forthcoming book, How Did I Get Here? A Memoir of the Baby Boom Generation.
First astonishment. Then outrage.
Mine.
I was viewing “California Dreaming,” a 2013 exhibit on Bay Area Jewish history at San Francisco’s eminent Contemporary Jewish Museum. The exhibit included the story of an extraordinary Jewish chicken ranching community in Petaluma, 40 miles north of San Francisco.
This museum exhibit was false: factually wrong and grossly distorted. How do I know this? I know, because I am the world’s foremost scholar of those chicken ranchers.
While I was writing my doctoral dissertation at UC Berkeley in 1974, I learned about a group of immigrant Eastern European Jewish chicken farmers who rejected cities to live a rural life, raising chickens for the market and building a community with all types of left wingers and a rich Yiddish cultural life. They were in Petaluma, a small town 35 miles north of San Francisco. I had found a place where I could answer a haunting question that an African American student had put to me in 1968 when I was a professor in North Carolina: “Are you Jewish?”
When I finished my Ph.D. dissertation in 1977, I turned down a job across the country as a history professor. I spent three more years sitting at Petaluma kitchen tables with my tape recorder, interviewing the old timers who founded this community, and then their children and grandchildren. And several years turning the interviews into a book. And another decade searching for a publisher while I changed careers.
In my 1993 book Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, published after I had retooled from historian to attorney, I retold the epic story of Jewish American immigration and assimilation over generations, through this unique little community. Here was another version of the Jewish immigrant lower east side of New York and their offspring, but on twentieth century California chicken ranches.
Twenty years later, in 2013, retired, I was flabbergasted by the fabrications of “California Dreaming.” The exhibit’s description of Jewish Petaluma censored out half the old immigrant community, the Communists, known by the Yiddish term linke, the left. Instead, the exhibit concocted a utopian fiction: a non-existent Zionist settlement in Petaluma, a fictitious community of people who lived together in kibbutzim, agricultural communes, and advocated the creation of a separate Jewish socialist agricultural nation in Palestine. The exhibit completely omitted the monumental decades-long Petaluma struggle between the linke and the rekhte, the left and the right, over Jewish life in the Soviet Union, Europe, Palestine, and America.
“California Dreaming” also ignored my book’s saga of social dislocation and cultural loss over generations: the vibrant shtetl-like immigrant community with modern socialist ideals; the troubled succession of culturally ambivalent American-born children; the assimilation and disappearance of the third generation, my own baby boom generation; and the stormy inheritance of the community by suburban newcomers. Instead, the exhibit claimed the community had died out in the 1950s with political squabbling. That squabbling, I knew, was in fact the profound political battles of the McCarthy era. And I knew that the contemporary Petaluma Jewish community is alive and thriving.
I believe in retelling history from different perspectives with new insights, and I had done plenty of it as a young left wing historian in the 1970s. But I don’t believe in inventing an alternate reality, making it up. That is what the museum had done.
I sent the museum a polite letter identifying significant errors about Petaluma in “California Dreaming.”
No response.
I wrote again explaining in detail why Petaluma Jewish history could not be understood without including the Communists.
Again, silence.
I was furious, and curious. My book about that community, nineteen years in the making, had been my finest work in any of my professions, and the museum had ignored it. I drafted an op-ed for the Bay Area’s Jewish community newspaper. I wanted to smoke out the museum’s explanation for its distortions. I wanted the museum to recognize the linke, admit to the political battles of the 1950s, and acknowledge the cultural losses with assimilation over generations.
I would not let the Museum get away with this historical blasphemy.
* * *
I began tape recording the Petaluma Jewish “pioneers” in 1974. They were Yiddish speaking people in their 70s and 80s, born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe around the beginning of the twentieth century. They opened a door to the Old World of my own Chicago immigrant grandparents.
These Petaluma immigrant chicken ranchers were socialists of many stripes – Communists, Labor Zionists, social democratic Arbeiter Ringers, anarchists – with a volatile history of political clashes among themselves and with gentiles too. They were Yiddishists and Hebraicists with Slavic origins, literate people with a rich community cultural life.
Dozens of this elderly generation recounted to me giant young lives that brought them to this tiny California chicken ranching community. They began with epic tales of Eastern European Jewish life, the origin stories my North Carolina Black students had been searching for in African history. I heard about shtetl life, pogroms and antisemitic murders, fighting in World War I, marauding Ukrainian and Russian armies, upheavals with the Russian Revolution, and battles with parents over stifling religious orthodoxies and seductive modern ideas. I followed their sagas of fantastic emigration journeys to California by way of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and America.
Explaining settlement on Petaluma chicken ranches, some proudly recalled youthful agricultural idealism with plans to migrate later to kibbutzim in Palestine. Others spoke of wanting to show that Jews could work with their hands, or that they could follow the agrarian example of the ancient Hebrews, or just find a better life than city sweatshops and pushcarts.
And they did. They created a hothouse immigrant enclave in Petaluma, “the Egg-Basket of the World,” a dusty little northern California farming town of the 1920s and 1930s. They were a hundred Jewish families spread out on little farms near Petaluma, with an engrossing community life in town on Western Avenue at the small Jewish Community Center.
The “Center,” built in 1925, had been the subject of raging disputes over whether to include a shul, a synagogue, for the community’s religious minority. The farbrente, red hot, Communists and Zionists and Arbeiter Ringers – all atheists, all rebels against their parents’ traditional religious orthodoxies – finally did build a tiny shul, according to community legend, for the tax benefits.
From the Center, the Jewish chicken ranchers participated in world events. It was the site for constant gatherings, their American-born kids sleeping on benches, while Yiddish and Hebrew organizations met late into the nights. They wired reports of their resolutions – on the Tom Mooney defense, the 1929 Palestine riots, the Scottsboro Boys struggle, the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact – across the country and around the globe: “Here is where Petaluma stands.”
There was a ferocious 1934 political battle for control of the Center that actually ended in a gentile court with a rekhte victory. A year later, Sol Nitzberg, dubbed “the rabbi from Communism” because of his family rabbinical tradition and his fiery radicalism dating back to the 1905 Russian Revolution, was tarred and feathered by local vigilantes for organizing a strike by migrant apple pickers in nearby Sebastopol. There were struggles by Jewish Communists against local fascist Silver Shirts and Brown Shirts, and then came the wartime Popular Front to defeat Hitler and Mussolini.
In the 1950s McCarthy era, the rekhte, the community’s right wing socialists, remembering the 1935 tar and feathering of that Jewish Communist, expelled the linke organizations from the Jewish Community Center out of the fear of gentile persecution of all Jews as Communist subversives. The linke had impudently celebrated Stalin’s birthday at the Jewish Community Center by singing happy birthday, first in Yiddish and then Russian, and had brazenly staged public Yiddish concerts in Petaluma with Paul Robeson to raise money to fight the execution of the Rosenbergs for atomic spying. FBI agents had been in Petaluma questioning people about linke activists, and there had been rumors about rekhte informers to the FBI.
Conducting interviews in the 1970s, 25 years after the ousting of the linke from the Jewish Community Center, I learned that no one in the Petaluma Jewish community forgot those Cold War political battles, and no one forgave. This was an agrarian community with enduring politics.
Petaluma was “on the map” in those decades, known worldwide, in New York City and Los Angeles, Palestine and the Soviet Union. When eminent Jewish political and cultural leaders visited the west coast in the 1920s and 1930s, they came to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranching community. A lifelong Zionist, Khaya Eisenstein, described to me a Depression era visit from Golda Meir, raising money for Labor Zionist kibbutzim in Palestine; I could picture Khaya in her jalopy, driving along dusty back-roads, visiting the Jewish chicken ranches with Golda.
“What took you so long to get here?” one old-timer challenged me in 1975, when I first walked into his house with my tape recorder. They knew they were titans of twentieth century world history. Of course this young historian would show up to hear their stories. And I arrived just in time, a few years before that entire generation would be gone.
* * *
As a young historian in the 1960s and 1970s, I was part of a trend, the “new labor history,” that shaped my Petaluma inquiry. Established by historians of the Old Left of the 1940s and 1950s, and fed by my baby boom generation of New Left historians in the Sixties and Seventies, we focused on workers lives – their work, communities, families, religion, politics, and movements. Our attention to “ordinary people” included immigrants, ethnic minorities, and women. We regarded workers as actors, not victims, as people who resisted capitalism and struggled for power. Ours was a history of American class conflict.
We contested a previous generation of historians who portrayed American history as a broad popular consensus over capitalism and democracy. Those older historians saw an American melting pot of disparate peoples who reached political bargains over differences and enjoyed upward mobility through economic growth, with minimal conflict and protest. My Ph.D. dissertation, on the incendiary anarchist labor movement in nineteenth century Chicago, focused on capitalist exploitation and working class conflict, was in swing with my Sixties era of dissent and challenge to authority.
In Petaluma I made a discovery: these Jewish chicken ranchers were the “ordinary people” we New Left historians were resurrecting. And there was nothing ordinary about them. They were outspoken about their historical significance – Old World rebellions against family and government, courageous emigration to new lives in America and around the planet, and this boiling political cauldron of a chicken ranching community in Petaluma. They saw themselves in epic dimensions as part of the great currents of twentieth century Jewish world history in Russia, Europe, Palestine, and America.
I also discovered from the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranchers that I too was Jewish, the answer to my long persisting question from my Black students in North Carolina. Like me, the Petaluma Jewish immigrants were secular and socialist, and believed in struggles for social justice. I was not steeped in Jewish life, Old World or New World, like them. I had not experienced antisemitism, the real thing in the shtetl, or even like the fascists marching in the streets of 1930s Petaluma. But I knew their Jewish history. I was familiar with their political and cultural passions. In my bones I grasped their rebellions against the orthodoxies of their Old World parents, their modern skepticism and sharp Jewish humor.
I admired the confidence of these chicken ranchers in their own historical significance, something I had shared in the Sixties upheaval of my own generation. I understood their wistful resignation that their Yiddish culture would not continue with succeeding American generations of Jews.
These old time Jewish chicken ranchers were my people, they had no question they were Jewish, and they knew I was one of them, Jewish. I was preserving their history and searching for its meaning. How could I be anything other than Jewish? Question answered.
I also recognized these Petaluma Jewish immigrants as the last generation of a disappearing culture, the Yiddish-speaking world of Eastern European Jewry remade in America. I knew their lives were momentous, and early on I began depositing my transcribed interviews in the library at UC Berkeley, so that in a hundred years there would be voices preserved from this lost Yiddish world.
Grateful future historians would thank me, I was sure.
* * *
I had yet another realization: there was a larger Jewish Petaluma story about the succeeding generations, the American born children and grandchildren. Did the immigrant generation leave a legacy? Did the offspring inherit a dedication to farming? Was there more fevered politics, bubbling cultural life, devotion to family and comrades, hostility to religion, identity as secular Jews? And what were their relationships with gentile Petaluma?
I planned a book that would recount the American saga of Eastern European Jewish immigration and assimilation, based on the three Petaluma generations. I would interview the second generation, my parents’ generation. And then my own baby boom generation: with our Old World grandparents and American parents, who were we, and where were we heading?
When I rejected that job across the country as a professor, when I abandoned a conventional historian’s career, I had to find financial support for several years of interviews and writing about chicken ranchers. I began fundraising in the Bay Area Jewish community. All roads led to the preeminent historical institution, the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, where I had deposited my first interview transcriptions. I arranged a meeting with the museum’s director, Seymour Fromer. He invited a prominent Jewish immigration historian, professor Moses Rischin.
Decades later, when I went to see “California Dreaming” at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, I should have prepared myself by remembering that early meeting at the Magnes Museum with the Bay Area’s leaders of Jewish history. First things first: Fromer and Rischin let me know I was a latecomer. They had long been aware of the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranchers. Indeed, they were irritated that a young neophyte – me – presumed to tackle this delicate history.
On to the main business: they raged against Petaluma’s Communist Jewish chicken ranchers. They blamed the linke for Bay Area gentiles associating Jews with Communist disloyalty to America. They castigated the dangerous Communist chicken rancher who had been tarred and feathered in 1935 for his reckless labor organizing that invited gentile retaliation. They berated the 1950s Yiddish folk chorus for those provocative public concerts to defend the Rosenbergs. And the banishment of the linke organizations from the Petaluma Jewish Community Center in the McCarthy era? Yes, they insisted, the expulsions were necessary to protect Bay Area Jewish communities from charges of Communist subversion. For them Petaluma was infamous rather than famous.
They sized me up as a New Left fellow traveler, a sympathizer, of those Communist chicken ranchers. My distinguished academic credentials from UC Berkeley – another politically troubled place – counted against me, not for me. My two years of Petaluma interviews counted for nothing. Enlightened after an hour of their polemics, I realized that these guys, still fighting McCarthy era battles to purge Communists from the Jewish community, never would support my project.
I was stunned. It was the first time I had been punished as a scholar for my politics, or, in this case, my suspected politics.
Following that disastrous meeting, I understood better when I re-read Professor Rischin’s acclaimed book, The Promised City, a pioneering history of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City. Professor Rischin reduced Jewish radicalism to a short-lived transitional outburst on the immigrant journey to becoming “modern Americans” who enjoyed “the grandeur of American freedom” through electoral politics, collective bargaining, and other democratic institutions.
But I was not telling that familiar story of successful and seamless Eastern European Jewish Americanization. My Eastern European immigrant chicken ranchers persisted in Petaluma as Communist, socialist, and Zionist world changers, not as immigrant clay destined to be molded into liberal democratic Americans. And as that stubborn Petaluma Jewish immigrant generation gave way to the assimilation of their offspring, the American born generation, I found painful losses: the disappearance of the original shtetl-like community and the rich tumultuous immigrant political culture. I considered myself as representative of a third generation, the grandchildren, rebels against the accommodations of our parents to American middle-class life. We looked for inspiration to our radical immigrant grandparents and our own baby boom rebellion in the Sixties.
A year after this awful meeting at the Magnes Museum, having found no financial backing from any Jewish source, I was ready to give up when the gentile establishment blessed my project. I found support at the California Historical Society, where they celebrated the Jewish chicken rancher story as a fresh perspective on California history, a vacation from Father Serra and the missions, remote from the Gold Rush and the great earthquake. The Historical Society believed in my project and won a supporting grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
For months, I worried about Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire awarding my new NEH grant one of his “golden fleece” awards, for frivolous government spending, in my case a study of left wing Jewish chicken ranchers. But he missed this one.
I was launched.
* * *
I conducted hundreds more interviews in the years ahead: the children of the immigrants, the grandchildren, and the new suburban settlers who inherited the community.
The children of the immigrants were the generation of my own American-born parents. Here was a lifelong assimilation drama. They grew up in an ingrown little immigrant chicken ranching community in the 1920s and 1930s, surrounded by a small-town gentile world at once attractive and strange, whether it was embarrassment over parents with Yiddish accents or antisemitic insults from classmates or dating forbidden gentile teens. After the war many tried to transform their parents’ tiny chicken ranches into modern American poultry businesses, but their ambitious poultry operations couldn’t compete with an emerging national corporate poultry industry, and they were painfully displaced to new businesses and vocations. They grew up embracing their parents’ Communist, socialist and Zionist world views, and they loyally participated in the community’s bruising political battles of the McCarthy era. But then, exasperated, they shed those immigrant politics for school board elections, Masons and Elks membership, and a few finally joining the once exclusive Petaluma Golf and Country Club. Searching for how to raise their own kids as Jewish, they eventually abandoned their parents’ fervent secularism. Some created a congregation, hired rabbis, and sent the kids to Hebrew School for bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs.
The immigrant generation disapproved the second generation’s evolution. “They are not progressive like they used to be,” one left-winger explained. “It’s because of the American atmosphere, the sentiment. It’s the whole combination of life, not just in Petaluma, but all over the United States. They want everyone to be conservative.”
One of the grandchildren – one of my third-generation cohorts – dismissed his parents as “the garbage compacter generation:” apolitical, and addicted to wasteful consumption. I laughed, I understood, because this was my own origins.
But interviewing this second generation in their modernized ranch houses, visiting this familiar suburban world of my own parents, sitting in the tidy living rooms with tchotchkes from Israel visits but no serious books, I came to appreciate their successful lifelong struggles for prosperity and acceptance, their persisting anxieties over how they fit into Petaluma as children of Jewish immigrants. I recognized pride in their immigrant Jewish origins, even after their lifelong struggle to find acceptance as Americans.
They had left and lost the immigrant world of their parents, some without remorse: “I don’t regret the old Jewish community has passed,“ one explained. “It was a warm, tight, active community for over half a century before it began to dissolve. It was a great experience at the time, but you can’t get locked into one lifestyle. Life changes constantly, and we must adapt.”
* * *
In the late 1970s I interviewed the third generation, my own baby boom generation, then in their late 20s and early 30s. I found loss and dislocation. The bitter McCarthy era political battle between the linke and the rekhte in the early 1950s left the community permanently divided over the postwar decades. The local chicken ranching economy collapsed in the 1960s with the emergence of a national corporate poultry industry that displaced family farms and farming communities. Their parents, the second generation, with new work and new interests, were drifting away from the Jewish community, becoming active in American Petaluma.
Many of the third generation lived in transient town apartments, funky country shacks, and even old chicken houses on their parents’ property. Some had broken away in the Sixties with rebellious politics and the counterculture, followed by new age religions and therapies. Others explored kibbutz life in Israel, and some turned to making money.
A few tried to reinvent their own traditions. Barry Nitzberg, grandson of the tarred and feathered Communist chicken rancher, battled with grandchildren of the tar-and- feather mob over the Vietnam War. Greta Sanders, in her own search for Jewish identity, followed her Petaluma grandfather’s agrarian socialism by moving to an Israeli kibbutz that originally had been settled by migrant Petaluma chicken ranchers. Steve Dorfman stepped beyond his chicken-raising grandparents and parents with his business breeding and auctioning animals, cattle, which an immigrant chicken rancher once described to me as “a complicated animal” compared to chickens.
But as a generation, in my 1970s interviews I thought this third generation were lost. They differed from both their immigrant grandparents and their American-born parents: unmarried, uncertain about vocation, largely apolitical in the wake of the Sixties, with no sense of historical significance, Jewish or otherwise. Separated from Jewish community life, they were uncertain what it meant to be Jewish. One, from a cultured Zionist family with a long Petaluma history, showed me a book she used to educate herself in place of a community tradition, a “do it yourself kit” on Judaism.
They had sentimental ties to the 1950s shtetl community of their grandparents and parents, where they grew up on chicken ranches in a tight community. They remembered their grandparents: the Yiddish, the volatile political commitments, the Jewish cooking, the wry humor. They still returned to Petaluma for the bris of a new baby, bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, weddings and funerals; it was a return to “the whole cycle of life” they had not recreated in their own lives, but still could find in Petaluma.
Here was my rebellious Sixties generation: disconnected from their community and separated from their history, without their place. I knew them: their loss, their drift, their hazy future.
* * *
Instead, the Petaluma Jewish community was inherited by the “newcomers.” They were young Jewish families, professional and business people who settled in Petaluma from the 1970s as the freeway transferred Petaluma into a growing San Francisco bedroom suburb. They lived in the new housing tracts on the former empty prairies of east Petaluma. They had moved there to raise kids in affordable new homes and suburban schools. Here was an alter ego baby boom generation, the familiar world of my own high school classmates who had remained near my Chicago suburb and tuned out of the Sixties upheaval.
Like the grandchildren of the Petaluma Jewish immigrants, these newcomers were disconnected from the old chicken ranching community and its agrarian character, ferocious socialist politics, and rich Yiddish culture. But they were transforming Petaluma’s once secular Jewish Community Center into a suburban congregation, which they renamed Congregation B’nai Israel, after Petaluma’s first German Jewish congregation from the 1860s. Their Petaluma Jewish community centered on the rabbi, religious services and holiday celebrations, children’s Jewish education, bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. They wanted to replace the little old stucco Jewish Community Center building with a big modern synagogue.
They tried to draw in the old chicken ranching families with events like a square dance and an Israel celebration, all dismal flops. Several newcomer guys explained how they now controlled “the power base” in the community, the Center’s board of directors, and no longer needed the old chicken ranching families. A volunteer community librarian told how she discovered old Yiddish socialist books in the Center, puzzled why they were there and threw them away.
And yet, through dozens of interviews with the newcomers in the late 1970s, I recognized that this community was their Jewish place in a town “with gentile neighbors who drink beer in the evening.” “At the Center,” one explained, “we met other young Jewish couples with similar circumstances. We developed real relationships with them – the kind you get from hours sitting in the Center peeling potatoes for a big Channukah dinner.”
One grandson of the immigrant chicken ranchers mercilessly denounced the newcomers as “white bread and mayonnaise” compared to his “pumpernickel and mustard.” He detested their “ticky-tack houses and shopping centers in the old hayfields,” their “fancy little restaurants and boutiques” in town. “They’ll never understand what this community was all about.”
The linke immigrant generation also were puzzled by the newcomer community: “They have their rabbi and their congregation at the Center, and we don’t bother them. They have services and services and more services with this rabbi.” Another old-timer, a rekhte remnant of the Yiddish secular chicken ranching shtetl, put it to me simply in the early 1980s: “Now Petaluma [the Jewish community] is like everywhere else.”
* * *
Ten years later, now a lawyer, with publication of my chicken ranchers book finally approaching in 1993, I returned to Petaluma to investigate the current lives of the grandchildren and the newcomer community for my book’s concluding chapters. By then I had reluctantly abandoned my doomed scheme to become a free-lance historian of chicken ranchers, for a more reliable, less exciting vocation as a litigation attorney. I was married, by the newcomer rabbi I had met in Petaluma, and had a daughter, a San Francisco home, and my own communities too, including Chamokome, my collectively owned coastal ranch to the west of Petaluma. I had found my “place,” not in geography but in history and community with family and friends. By the 1990s the old Petaluma Jewish community would have described me as “gesettled.”
Then, settled, I could discover that Petaluma’s third generation Jews, too, had grown up and settled, years late like me and many other baby boom rebels. Now they had their own families, vocations, homes and communities. But few participated in the Petaluma Jewish community, which the newcomers had transformed and no longer fit the Petaluma grandchildren’s nostalgic childhood memories.
The newcomers had established a new Petaluma Jewish community, a congregation with a rabbi, focused on Jewish education for children. The old Center building remained; they had decided to remodel, not rebuild. And now they had ties with the old chicken ranching families, whose members helped with building maintenance and occasionally showed up for events at the Center, along with a few from the local third generation, those raising their children as Jewish.
I was ready to conclude my book. It still was a wrenching story of Jewish community breakdown and diminished Jewish identity over generations of American assimilation. But now with continuities from the old chicken ranching shtetl. And with some optimism for the newcomer community’s future.
* * *
A few months after publication of Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, in 1993, I returned to the Center one Sunday morning for a discussion with Jewish community members. The old timers, the immigrant generation, had largely died by then, and I never would learn their reactions to my book. But the old social hall was filled with the children and grandchildren and newcomers I had interviewed over a decade ago, and many newer newcomers I’d never met. I spoke about my long journey to write the book. But my purpose was to give them an opportunity to air any grievances with me. And they did.
One debate immediately flared over whether my account was biased in favor of the linke. Barry Nitzberg, grandson of the Communist chicken rancher who had been tarred and feathered, defended me from rekhte offspring. Other criticisms bubbled up: factual errors, colorful people I had missed, important events I had omitted, and my accounts of everything from raising chickens to raising children.
Here was my fractious Jewish chicken ranching community working over my book. I was relieved that my generation, the grandchildren and the newcomers, all baby boomers, did not accuse me of too harsh treatment and a too gloomy conclusion. And no one complained about my larger story of assimilation over generations and the cultural dislocations with loss of the old Yiddish socialist chicken ranching shtetl. That was a given, without my book, accepted as the way it was.
Everyone, linke and rekhte, children and grandchildren and newcomers, agreed on one complaint I never had expected: the book’s fictitious names. I had used aliases to provide some anonymity for my informants with the book’s public airing of messy community history. But they wanted their names connected to the book’s characters, and within weeks of publication community members had compiled a comprehensive list that correlated fictitious and real names. I took this grievance as praise that my account was accurate and sympathetic.
They were grateful, too, that I had preserved their remarkable community story in a book. They thanked me, as if this two-decades historical quest had been my faithful community service, rather than my attempt to understand my own third generation and the history that shaped us.
* * *
The “California Dreaming” exhibit was 20 years later, 2013. By then my book had been published long ago. I thought I was done with the chicken ranchers. But now, surveying the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s fantastical warping of Petaluma Jewish history in the “California Dreaming” exhibit, I wondered if my years devoted to telling that story had been wasted.
Here was the Contemporary Jewish Museum, one of those “grateful future historians” I had imagined when I began tape recording in 1975, oblivious to my book and the tapes. The museum had confabulated Petaluma Jewish history by portraying a Zionist colony that never existed and by denying the existence of the linke. It had warped the portraits and politics and years-long battles of community members. It had ignored cultural losses with assimilation over generations and the painful struggles over Jewish community and identity. The Museum had denied the existence of a contemporary Petaluma Jewish community.
The Museum’s distortion of Petaluma Jewish history was no accident. It fit the exhibit’s sanitized version of Bay Area Jewish history. Along with Petaluma’s linke, “California Dreaming” largely ignored Jewish participation in the long history of Bay Area social justice movements. And it showed no confused clashes between generations. No painful struggles over assimilation. No alienation, disappointment, or rebellion, the stuff that filled the novels of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Phillip Roth. The exhibit omitted almost everything controversial, surprising, and interesting.
Instead “California Dreaming” offered the usual vanilla pudding, a smug celebration of Jewish accomplishment and gentile acceptance: Jewish Gold Rush pioneers, nineteenth century German Jewish entrepreneurial families, the twentieth century building of synagogues and hospitals and cemeteries and day camps, glowing testimonials by current community members, and – some pizzazz – contemporary female rabbis and Jewish Zen practitioners.
Here was the Jewish Establishment party line, following Professor Rischin and his successor historians: a happy story of successful Jewish integration into an open-minded, dynamic, and democratic Western metropolis, with Jewish identity painlessly preserved. “California Dreaming” omitted those who opposed this assimilation and those who did not reach the American mainstream. The exhibit ignored the dislocations and losses of those who made it. There was no place for a Petaluma linke, or even a rekhte, in this antiseptic account of regional Jewish prosperity, mobility, and acceptance.
I refused to suffer in silence. I wrote a blistering op-ed about “California Dreaming” for J. the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California. In a note published alongside, the Museum called my op-ed “passionate,” which meant irrational. It thanked me for clarifying the “subtleties” of Petaluma history, which meant my concerns were pedantic. And, after ignoring my letters, the Museum actually congratulated itself for fostering “robust discussion.” In short, the museum dismissed me and my disputatious socialist chicken ranchers and their struggling successors as embarrassing distant cousins. Through my op-ed, we had gate crashed “California Dreaming,” interrupting its tribal celebration of Jewish triumph.
Turns out, it clarified my puzzlement about why this fairy tale exhibit about the Petaluma Jewish community, and about whether the errors were from ignorance or bias. I concluded the museum was both ignorant and biased in its portrayal of the chicken ranchers. And the museum was determined to continue its biased ignorance.
I recalled the frank anti-Communism of the Magnes Museum leaders 35 years previous, when I had gone to solicit their support for my Petaluma Jewish history project. This current Jewish museum offered a smoother and shallower response, blithely unaware of any issues or errors in its telling of this history, resolved to depict only Jewish accomplishment, and make it up if necessary.
* * *
A year after the “California Dreaming” exhibit, 2014, I had an opportunity to see the Petaluma Jewish community present its own history. I joined the Petaluma Jews for a sesquicentennial celebration, 150 years. They reverently dated their origins back to 1864 when Petaluma’s first German Jewish settlers, business people, established Congregation B’nai Israel.
That evening, just outside the Petaluma hotel banquet hall, I was startled by a display of newspaper articles spanning their history. The first was a blown-up picture of me with my tape recorder at a 1982 interview. The photo showed a young man with dark hair, long sideburns, and face glowing with the great chicken ranchers project. Now 70, I stared at my image, at all my years with this community. As their historian, now I was in their exhibit too, reflecting my own honored place in Petaluma Jewish history.
I entered a banquet room packed with some 200 community members, everyone speaking furiously. I recognized people I had interviewed in the 1970s, the older ones now looking ancient, and my generation looking old, like me.
Petaluma’s rabbi Ted Feldman was the evening’s first speaker, and he did what you want a leader to do. He presented their proud history back to the 19th century, placed it in the millennia story of the survival of the Jewish people, and offered a future vision of enduring values and new forms of community expression. I’ve had many conversations with Rabbi Feldman about Petaluma Jewish history. That evening, as he referred to the community’s trials and conflicts along with its continuity and triumphs, I thought: “He’s absorbed my book.”
At the sesquicentennial, the long-gone founders, the extraordinary Eastern European immigrant generation, were reduced to revered icons, frozen in ancient pictures. They filled the community’s beloved picture of the 1925 banquet opening the new Petaluma Jewish Community Center. It showed the social hall packed with immigrant chicken ranchers at long banquet tables, dignified in fine suits and dresses, posing with pride and solemnity in their new community building.
I had long admired this old photo hanging at the Center, and was grateful to see it at this historical gathering. I had interviewed some of those people, and I wished they could be present. But that great generation participated only as the ghostly pioneers.
Center stage that evening of sesquicentennial went to the remnants of the American-born second generation, now in their 80s, reminiscing about their own heyday – the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s – when they charged into mainstream American life from their immigrant chicken ranching families. But now they were silent about the excruciating difficulties they had described to me in 1970s interviews: growing up in their parents’ stormy stifling Petaluma shtetl, their hunger to break out of family chicken ranches and Old World ways and Old World disputes, the difficult journeys to become Americans accepted by gentile Petaluma, the slow discarding of their parents’ socialist politics to become liberal Democrats, apolitical, and even one conservative Republican. Here was the second generation telling the “California Dreaming” success story, celebrating Jewish assimilation, omitting the painful struggles and losses. I could only wish they’d re-read their own conflicted and ambivalent stories in their interviews with me and in my book.
Many of the grandchildren, my baby boom generation, were present that evening. But they gave no public recollections of their postwar childhood community or the dislocations of separation from it. They had not remade the community for their third generation, and so they had little to add to the evening’s history tale. Most had departed from their community long ago, even those who still lived in the area, without leaving a historical footprint. I had told that story in my book, and here it lurked again. Did anyone else notice the disappearance of a generation? Yes, but there was not much left to say about it, although I would have been interested in an explanation.
The sesquicentennial’s presentation included many pictures of the newcomer community members – the suburban settlers of the 1970s and the following decades – but not much “history.” Some things had happened that interested me, all understandably omitted that evening: a bitter community dispute over burial of gentile spouses in the Jewish cemetery, some controversial rabbis, a persisting conflict over whether the old Petaluma Jewish cemetery was owned by the congregation or an old-time chicken ranching family. And – historically significant in my reckoning, but not mentioned – at last they had taken action on the old Jewish Community Center building: restoration, not rebuilding, including a sparkling refurbishment of the little shul that had been disputed at construction in 1925, the religious sanctuary that some of the immigrant generation had proudly refused to enter during their decades in the building.
At my table with some leaders of the newcomer community, they explained to me that nothing “historical” had happened after my 1993 book publication, at least nothing significant like the sagas of the immigrant chicken ranchers. They were thoughtful about this history, and I liked them. But I had heard the same thing in the 1970s when I had interviewed the second and third generations about their lives. I had written about the lost sense of historically significant lives with assimilation. Here was more of the same. Alas, here too was the influence of my book – a pernicious influence – with its glowing depiction of that towering immigrant generation and their epic life journeys, continuing to overshadow the assimilated American generations who followed.
In contrast to “California Dreaming,” the Petaluma sesquicentennial’s homegrown history presentation did include the 1930s and 1950s battles of the linke and rekhte. This was an honest attempt to remember those ancient left-wing politics from another century. And that evening’s account included other community differences: generations, religious and secular, Holocaust survivors and their children, chicken ranchers and suburbanites. This was a more accurate and complex portrayal of their history, a more probing account than the sterile ideological fictions of the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
Rabbi Feldman had asked me to write something for the 150th anniversary commemorative publication. I contributed an essay on my personal relationship with the community’s history. That essay launched this reflection on my 50 years with the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranching community: Why remember? Who cares?
I care. I had adopted this community in the 1970s as its historian. I had poured myself into the book, 19 years from first visit to 1993 publication. And here I was, 2015, still grappling with this unfolding story.
Constructing that Petaluma Jewish history was a reckoning with my own past, a past shared by many of my baby boom generation: Yiddish speaking immigrant grandparents who were socialists and shopkeepers, American born parents who blazed their way into mainstream American life after the war, suburban upbringing and Sixties rebellion, New Left re-conception of American history, and, after the collapse of the Sixties upheaval, a quest for my own family, work, politics, and community. In Petaluma, I had found a community where I could locate myself in history and search for my future.
From the beginning of my inquiry into the history of the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranchers, I was confident that the future will care about the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranchers. That is where I began my inquiry, with a hope to save voices and experience from the lost world of Eastern European Jewry, and that is what will happen. Stanford University will be the repository for some 400 transcribed interviews I conducted on the Petaluma Jewish chicken ranchers and for my dozens of taped interviews of the immigrant generation, preserved for the future. Grateful future historians will care.
Today, the Petaluma Jewish community, too, cares about its history. Today the community is flourishing with over 100 member families, more than at the 1925 opening of the Center. The community has looked to its past to guide its future. Several years ago the board reorganized the community, from a congregation back to a “Center,” like the immigrant opening of the same building in 1925. This new Center, like the original, reaches widely into the current Jewish community through secular social and cultural programs along with the congregation and religious schools. It draws in families from the old chicken ranching community, linke and rekhte, aged children, some aging grandchildren, and now great grandchildren of the chicken ranchers, together with waves of the young suburban newcomer families who had continued arriving in the decades following my 1970s interviews.
The museum creators of “California Dreaming” also should have cared. I wished that they had witnessed the Petaluma Jewish community’s sesquicentennial celebration, with all its exuberance and limitations. They would have discovered that today’s community is thriving in numbers, participation, vision, and historical imagination. They could have learned that community history, including turbulent political disputes, can be told without an agenda that denies facts and clouds understanding. They might have realized that censorship of history dishonors all our ancestors and distorts the present. They might have understood that accomplishment, Jewish historical accomplishment, can include clashes, dislocations, loss, and regret.
It was not all harmony over the decades in the Petaluma Jewish Community Center. That’s why this Jewish chicken rancher history was vibrant. “Politics we had plenty.”