landsmanshaftn

Friday Jan 18

by


Same as yesterday
in my company were Sister
Clara & husband.

I.M.W.
again writes me to help him
I shall give the letter to Budiener

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Matt’s Notes

I can’t quite figure out what the second section of this entry says. I.M.W. (if I’m reading that right) might be a reference to Papa’s brother, Isaac, over in Europe (Papa has started to write something that looks like “Isaac” and crossed it out, though it’s mostly illegible). I’m also having trouble with the last word of the entry (Budinier? Badinez?) so I don’t know to whom or what Papa plans to give “I.M.W’s” letter.

My other theory is that this is a reference to the tubercular acquaintance “I. Marlanoff” from Papa’s January 2nd entry, and “Budiener” is a doctor or representative of a landsmanshaft, or mutual aid society. Supported by dues, such groups served as ready-made social networks for new arrivals, formed religious congregations, and provided medical care, loans and burial services to landsman (people from the same place).

Papa’s charitable fraternal order, B’nai Zion, probably qualifies as such an organization. Many of his old friends are buried in Sons of Zion cemetery plots and I know they ran a credit union and resold life insurance. But while many of the old landsmanshaftn were geared toward people from the same town, I don’t think B’nai Zion was. Such narrow regional focus might even have been on the wane by the 20’s as Jews stitched themselves into a broader community and as formal support became more available from government agencies and organizations like labor unions. This would be consistent with the overall evolution of fraternal organizations, which, as noted earlier, grew less chauvinistic as the path to Americanization grew clearer.

By the way, I learned a lot about the landsmanshaftn during a visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum yesterday (they have a link to some good information here) and I also got a much clearer idea of what Papa’s living situation must have been like in early 1924. I’ll add more about that later.

Tuesday July 15

by


Went with Jack Z. to arrange
with a lawyer about the
camp credit union.

I am alarmed not having
received any call yet
about my naturalization.

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Matt’s Notes

“Jack Z.” is, as we’ve noted before, the august Jack Zichlinsky, one of Papa’s best friends and a brother in the Zionist fraternal organization Order Sons of Zion (B’nai Zion). Immigrants like Papa were used to getting a number of financial, medical and legal services through private, dues-supported organizations like B’nai Zion, which was already a burial society and a reseller of life insurance for its members. As an officer of his local chapter Papa was obviously responsible for organizing its credit union as well.

Though he’s discussed B’nai Zion many times before, this entry has the first mention of Papa’s naturalization status. According to The National Archives and Ancestry.com Web sites, naturalization would have been a two-step process for Papa: after living in the U.S. for at least two years, he would have filed a Declaration of Intention to naturalize (a.k.a. “First Papers”) and after a waiting period of another three to five years he would have filed a Petition for Naturalization.

Ancestry.com’s New York County Supreme Court Naturalization Petition Index shows that Papa probably filed his petition in June of 1920. He’d been waiting a while for his naturalization, but I wonder why he picked July 15th, 1924 to feel especially worried about it. Maybe Jack Z.’s own naturalization has just come through and he’d discussed it with Papa while they were out and about, or maybe naturalization chatter had increased in the local community, in the newspapers, or on the radio for some reason. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, a bill that imposed heavy immigration restrictions on Eastern Europeans (among other groups) had also become law couple of months earlier — maybe Papa had just gotten around to worrying about it now since it happened around the time of his father’s death. In any event, I have to look into this more.

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Additional References

Monday Aug 25

by


Attend an Executive m.
of the camp, at Nathan
Zichlinsky’s house in
Willoughby Ave. Bklyn. I
initiated and swore in
Treskinoff a new member.

—————–

Matt’s Notes

I love this entry. While we know what Papa’s talking about here — his chapter of the Zionist fraternal order B’nai Zion met in Brooklyn and Papa, as Master of Ceremonies, swore in a new member — the furtive quality of his sentences, the use of abbreviations, and the presence of a character named “Treskinoff” makes it seem like a passage from a spy novel, or maybe Doestoevsky.

Then again, the ritual Papa conducted would have involved some kind of secret combination of oaths, prayers, and the use of physical props, perhaps even in a candle-lit or blacked-out room. Maybe this put him into a clandestine, adventurous mood and accounts for the whiff of espionage on this page.

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Additional Note

Fraternal and mutual support organizations (a.k.a. landsmanshaftn) provided the only real sense of community for early Jewish immigrants, especially those who arrived befor the 20th Century. Their initiation rituals were accordingly elaborate, the better to establish a sense of exclusivity, belonging, and safety in a world where they were otherwise strangers. By the 1920’s, as the greater Jewish community grew more established and the process of assimilation less onerous, fraternal organizations played a less central role in the lives of people like Papa and their ceremonies, predictably, became a little more low-key. I’m sure the rite Papa administered to Treskinoff was far less involved than what their predecessors went through.