Generation Bubelah: Adjusting to Jewish life in 1930s America

This entry is the third in a series of an oral history I did with my grandmother before her passing. In her stories, she speaks of  her parents' immigration to America from Russia, growing up Jewish in a German neighborhood and simply being a Jewish girl in the Midwest. For the first entry, Midwest Judaism in the 1920s, click here, for the second entry, click here.

Food in our house served many functions, but it was especially a way for Mama to express her religious and cultural identity. In Russia, Mama's identity came from the food, and when she came to the states, it was a way for her to hold on to herself.
 
Because we are Ashkenazi our meals were different from Sephardic Jews. Although our practices were different, we still incorporated their style with ours. The most important food is fish because it is the oldest Jewish dish mentioned in the Torah. Another extremely important food in the Jewish cuisine is bread. We learned in Sunday school that bread was the basic food in Eretz Yisrael, and that it accompanied sacrifices and offerings in Biblical times. Well Mama's challah was made out of five grains wheat, barley, spelt, oats and rye. On Shabbat we would recite Ha-Motsi over the two-challah loaves and my father would tear off a piece of bread and pass it around the table. Each one of us would tear off a piece until everyone at the table had a bit of bread on his or her plate. On Rosh Hashanah, my mother made the two loaves of bread into different shapes.
 
Food was always tied to family gatherings, special occasions, and holidays; it was associated with warmth. I remember seeing Jewish cookbooks downtown, but I never bought one for my mother. Mama didn't think there was a need for them in her kitchen. The cookbooks became a way for women to successfully assimilate to America. Some of Mama's friends who had been cooking all their lives would take cooking classes. The cooking classes were taught by the German Jews to help the new immigrants coming to America. They would teach them how to prepare certain German dishes. Mama never once said a bad thing about the classes or the cookbooks. She just didn't trust them. The same thing happened with the start of the food processing industry. My mother, who had always made her own yeast, corned her own beef, and prepared her own pickles, could not believe the advances in technology. The invention of the vegetable shortening, phyllo dough, and frozen foods affected the Jewish cooking community. There was an ad in the newspaper for Crisco that said the "Hebrew Race had been waiting 4,000 years." Mama just laughed.

Although my mother did not want to change the way she cooked, a lot of the new inventions did save time and made her life easier. I don't think she would have started using vegetable shortening or any of the other new technologies if she had the resources she had while in Russia.
 
My family was orthodox and we kept a kosher kitchen. We had different utensils for the milchig [dairy], fleishig [meat products], and pareve [without meat or milk and their derivatives]. Many of my non-Jewish friends always thought that I was on a special diet and that was how I kept my petite little figure, but I ate that way not because I wanted to be healthy or lose weight. It was for my religion.
 
I never questioned the way we lived. I got used to going to the store and looking for the OU. Granted when I was younger less things were kosher than they are now. I remember the first manufactured product with an OU label on it was Heinz Ketchup. Then people went crazy when M&M's became Kosher. They were dancing in the street.
 
Rosh Hashanah is the first Jewish holiday that I remember. My favorite part of Rosh Hashanah is when they blow the Shofar. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah my family and I would walk down to the water and observe the ritual of Tishlich. We would throw breadcrumbs into the water to do away with all of our sins.
 
For Rosh Hashanah dinner, we would eat challah and apples dipped in honey. My mother made the challah in the shape of a ladder, always declaring that the ladder was to show how we direct our lives upward towards God.
 
It was demanded that we attend Hebrew and Sunday school. My parents did not believe in excuses. Everyday after school my brothers and I would walk to Agudath Achim at 558 Each Rich Street where we learned Hebrew. We put on the play The Enemies of Israel, by Louis Broido, which was a Chanukah fantasy in one act. I got to play Miriam. The other girls were jealous but I told them the only reason why they chose me was because my real name was Miriam. My father said it was because I had more chutzpah than the rest. We graduated from Hebrew school after the eighth grade and we were confirmed. It was a big deal to be confirmed and my parents took great pride in letting everyone know that their children made it through. The confirmation ceremony included many speeches that each person from the class recited. I recited the Confessions of Faith and the Covenant. The girls carried flowers while the boys wore corsages. Sunday June 4th, 1933 was when I received my diploma.
 
My father had his Bar Mitzvah when he was thirteen. At the time men were the only ones who were allowed to become a Bar Mitzvah. The first Bat Mitzvah did not occur in America until 1922. The Bat Mitzvah was a way for the Jewish community to respond to the division between genders. When the Jews came to America, they wanted to be more American and they began to do away with the Bar Mitzvah and started to have group confirmation ceremonies. Confirmations made it possible for women to participate in the same ceremonies as men. After some time, congregations did away with confirmation and invited the Bar and Bat Mitzvah back into their synagogues. I remember the Rabbi at our synagogue asked my daughter, Debby, to be the first Jewish woman to be Bat Mitzvahed in Columbus, Ohio. I wouldn't allow it because the ceremony would have been only in English, no Hebrew; the ceremony seemed meaningless.
 
Although Hebrew and Sunday school had ended it was just the beginning of our Jewish education. My mother was very involved in Young Judea, an organization that raised money for Israel and led discussions on the future of the country. I became very involved when I was in my teens because it was a community where we could discuss the situation of the Zionist movement in America and the horror in Germany. They held conventions all over America and I attended the first annual tri-state regional convention in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 8th 1934. The business of that particular meeting was to discuss the purpose and function of an organization of regional Young Judeans. The goal was to make people aware of what was going on around them concerning the Jews.