A New Look at an Old Classic, Life is with People

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, August 6, 2010

During the school year 2008-2009, our women’s study class at Shir Hadash focused on the Jewish mother. We used Joyce Antler’s book, You Never Call, You Never Write, The History of the Jewish Mother. A professor at Brandeis University, Antler was interested in how and why the stereotype we are all familiar with developed.

Contrary to many of our expectations, our class learned that early portrayals of the Jewish mother in American popular culture were very positive, up to and including the best known Jewish mother on television, Molly Goldberg. In introducing the negative stereotype of the Jewish mother, a stereotype which became firmly entrenched in popular culture, Antler discusses a classic of Jewish historical anthropology, Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl, by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, with an introduction by Margaret Meade, a book that was very popular with general readers, and which was still on the reading list for history classes when I was at the Hebrew Union College.

Antler hated the book. She spends half a chapter tearing it apart, speaking about its role in “stereotype perpetuation”. She, and other scholars in the field, are critical of its depiction of so called unchangeable patterns of the Jewish family. All of Jewish life in Eastern Europe was the shtetl according to this text which ignored changes that had taken place including the Haskalah or Jewish enlightenment, assimilation, economic development, and urbanization. The book was widely criticized as nostalgic and unrealistic, motivated more by a desire to counter anti-Semitic propaganda than by any systematic study. However, its depiction of Eastern European life took hold in the American Jewish imagination. Whole scenes in Fiddler on the Roof, can be traced verbatim to its reportage and unfortunately, its portrayal of the Jewish mother was extremely negative. She was, according to this text, nagging, whining and intrusive, a powerful, despot, whose love was so self-sacrificing and whose solicitude so overbearing, as to cripple her children. Antler notes that the two of the women who worked on the project had their own issues with their own Jewish mothers, one for example, describing her own mother as “domineering and controlling, cold, cruel and small.” Elizabeth Herzog, co-author of the book, in an early meeting about it in 1949, half-jokingly suggested that it be called, “Now I Understand My Mother.”

In passing, in one paragraph, Antler notes that one of the authors, Mark Zborowski was accused of being a Soviet spy, but that these accusations, “were not so much covered up as deemed irrelevant by those who wished to disassociate themselves from the ugly red-baiting of the era.” Thinking about the McCarthy era and reading those words two years ago, I didn’t think much about it.

I was quite surprised then this summer, to read an article by Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein, entitled, “Underground Man: The Curious Case of Mark Zborowski and the Writing of a Modern Jewish Classic”. In this article Zipperstein reveals the extent to which Zborowski was not a victim of red-baiting, but rather was a Stalinist spy.

Zborowski began spying in 1932, successfully infiltrating Trotskyite circles in Paris in the decade before World War II. He was directly implicated in the death of Trotsky’s son Lev, for whom he served as a personal secretary as well as several other members of the group. Ironically, a warning made to Trotsky about him, by Alexander Orlov, who had recruited the famous Cambridge spies Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, and was then on the run from Stalin, was ignored as Stalinist meddling.

With the more recently accessible Russian sources and declassified FBI data we know much more about this history. We can picture the initial approach made to Zborowski in Grenoble by a Soviet agent while he was working as a busboy in a hotel. Zborowski wrote at the time that, though he had volunteered as a young man in the Soviet Union for the Communist library, much to the dismay of his father, it was actually this experience that made him really understand Marxism. He had come from a fairly comfortable home, his father was a shopkeeper, and he was used to being treated with a certain respect. He writes that he was stunned that bourgeois women at the hotel could look right through him as if he wasn’t there when he delivered their breakfast, not even bothering to cover themselves up.

The detailed and flowing narrative that made his reports so popular with Stalin during the 1930’s, later served Zborowski well when he escaped to America and established himself as an anthropologist. It is likely that he did not have the doctorate from the Sorbonne with which he credited himself. In America, he continued to work as a spy for Stalin from his arrival in 1941 until 1945, even though he was benefitting from the aid of Trotskyite friends. He was still a spy as he helped Victor Kravchenko, a famous defector, write his anti-Stalinist memoir, I Chose Freedom. It seems that Zborowski sent the pages to Stalin, who provided his own commentary.

After working for a short time at a factory, Zborowski was hired by Max Weinrich the famous Yiddishist as a librarian at YIVO. He then went on to research jobs at Cornell, Harvard, and the American Jewish Committee where he worked with Marshall Sklare and dinned with Norman Podhoretz of Commentary fame. After he was convicted of spying in 1963, he served two years of a five year sentence, and then reestablished himself in San Francisco, as a medical anthropologist and pain specialist at Mt. Zion Hospital. His son made aliyah to Israel, but he and his wife remained in San Francisco until his death in 1990 at age 82.

So what does it mean that one of the best known books about Eastern European Jewish life before the war, was written by a Stalinist spy? Zipperstein thinks that the book’s focus on status, on the conflict between the sheyne yidn , the beautiful Jews, the cultured middle class, and the proste yidn the coarse Jews, the lower class, reflects Zborowski’s personal concerns.

Yet I wonder what inner process prompted Zborowski to put forward this simplistic and happy picture of the shtetl, without the complexity and darkness that he himself had experienced. His own recollections of his childhood, shared in an unusual unguarded moment with Margaret Meade, shortly after he had stopped being a spy and before anti-Communist hysteria took hold, paint a picture of life that is very different than the book’s. In the book he portrays the large families of the shtetl as loving and warm, while what he remembered was fighting with his 6 sibblings and as the youngest, wandering around each night looking for a place to lie down with no bed to call his own. Shabbes is portrayed glowingly in the book, but he described it to Meade as countless, oppressive rules and warnings, that “If we weren’t good we would be torn to pieces by the devil.”

Perhaps it was the full realization that he was painting a picture of a society that was no more that softened the report and lead to an idealization of the past. The full shock of the Holocaust was first reaching the Jewish community in the late 40’s and very early 50’s when this work was being done. In our summer Torah portions, Moses looks back at the past, warts and all, but perhaps that’s because he believes in the future, and knows that learning from past mistakes is critical. Zborowski was not looking to a future for this Eastern European Jewish culture and so perhaps was satisfied to preserve it as it never really had been.