Re: [Cz-L] Generalizing about the Cz Jewish Experience

Dear Jessica,

It was true of very many Jewish Czernowitzers that even though they were
born poor, to uneducated parents, they received a good education, which
enabled them to move into the middle class and lead lives which were quite
different from their parents' lives.
I wrote previously about my mother's family, who's education was average,
but who's economic situation changed from lower middle class to being quite
wealthy. But my father was one of 8 children of a very poor and uneducated
family who lived in the suburb of Manasteriska. At that time living in the
suburbs was considered the lowest of the low. My father's family was so
poor, that they sometimes did not have enough to eat and in the winter had
no shoes. Despite this, one of my uncles studied Medicine in France, another
became a very successful businessman and my father studied Mathematics at
Czernowitz University and got the equivalent of a masters degree.

This was not an isolated case. This was true of a very large segment of the
population. Many of the children of the very poor were brought up to
appreciate education and knowledge and against all odds, they studied and
worked and made their way into the middle class both in education and in
Financial wellbeing.

The generation of those who were born in the early part of the twentieth
century, which includes the parents of most of us who are members of this
list and were born in Czernowitz, were born into a world which was full of
hope for a better future, they believed in a more progressive, better
educated and more egalitarian society. For a while it seemed as if their
hopes would be fulfilled, possibly this is why they were quite blind to what
was happening all around them. You just have to look at the photographs of
our parents in the late twenties and early thirties and compare them with
earlier photographs of their parents, to see how well pleased our parents
were with life in Czernowitz.

Mimi

On 12/12/12 4:05 AM, "Attiyeh" <rea_at_ucsd.edu> wrote:

> My father's personal trajectory from birth to young adulthood in
> Czernowitz makes me wonder if there ever truly was a stereotypical
> Jewish class profile in Czernowitz, though certainly there could have
> been folks both poor and uneducated, and both wealthy and educated,
> who remained either poor or wealthy over their lifetimes. But my
> father, who moved upward economically and intellectually, and who in
> other ways didn't fit Mimi's or Hardy's demographic assumptions,
> couldn't have been an isolated case. He was just one generation
> earlier than the current Czernowitz-list members, and maybe things
> changed after he left. Maybe snobbery and class immobility was more
> true of a later time. But my dad's story doesn't fit either Mimi's or
> Hardy's sense of Jewish Czernowitz patterns. I more closely identify
> with Iris's perspective, which reflects experiences of an earlier time.
>
> My father was born in 1893, the 3rd youngest of ten children in a
> family where Yiddish was spoken. They moved from house to house
> several times in the area around Dreifaltigskeit, in what Mimi
> describes as the poor "lower part" of Czernowitz. Did Yiddish names
> and a large family suggest that they were, religious, even orthodox?
> I don't know about his parents or his early childhood, but I do know
> that my father was not observant at all in America. The only hint
> about his early years he ever shared was that he sometimes walked
> behind his father's coal cart. These things suggest poverty, and also
> lack of formal education if I understand Mimi's framework. However
> he was proud to have studied at Gymnasium before leaving for America
> in 1911 at age 18, which suggests either a rather swift ascent out of
> poverty and illiteracy in the family, or a long-term family reverence
> for education despite being poor. One of his nephews became a lawyer
> in Czernowitz, a brother became a businessman on one of the main
> Czernowitz avenues, so my father wasn't the only child of his family
> to move upward economically and socially in a fairly short time
> frame. He was literate in both Yiddish and German, It wasn't a case
> of either Yiddish or German. He chose to come to America rather than
> to Palestine, but after immigrating he soon became an ardent Zionist,
> was active in Jewish political organizations, started in the clothing
> industry as a labor organizer, then joined a specific trade starting
> at the bottom rung, and eventually became a Union official. He served
> as a liaison with Histadrut on trips to Israel. So these things also
> defy generalization. Jewishness was always a central part of his life
> despite the fact that he only attended synagogue services on the High
> Holidays and only when I was in Hebrew school, and he never learned
> to speak or read Hebrew. But he WANTED to be Jewish, years before,
> during, and after the brewing Holocaust made some people choose not
> to be obvious about who they were.
>
> Most of his colleagues and friends in America were Jewish and were
> similar to my father in all of these things, whether they'd come from
> Bukovina or Poland or elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Their stories are
> similar to lots of immigrant stories in America, among all ethnic
> groups, even today, when so many people are keeping their cultural
> roots strong even though they are not mainstream. But there is no one
> way to classify their individual stories. I have a feeling that it
> must have been the way things were for many Jewish families once upon
> a time in Czernowitz, too.
>
> [Jessica Attiyeh]
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Received on 2012-12-12 16:30:19