The Boston Globe
April 20, 2001, Friday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: ARTS; Pg. D12
LENGTH: 687 words
HEADLINE: Book Review Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America By Stephen G. Bloom Harcourt, 338 pp., $25;
ASSIMILATION AND KEEPING KOSHER IN IOWA
BYLINE: By Bob MacDonald, Globe Staff
BODY:
Iowans are so high on the hog that some years ago one small community erected a giant statue of a porker in the town square. This is not a state where you would expect to find a settlement of Hasidic Jews running a kosher meat-packing plant. Yet there it is, outside the town of Postville.Meanwhile, in Iowa City, author Stephen G. Bloom is getting his own taste of white-bread Iowa, having moved from San Francisco to teach journalism at the University of Iowa. The residents are mostly of German descent, the majority of them Lutherans.
It is a place where Lutherans do not marry Baptists, Baptists do not marry Catholics, and Jews are hardly known. Not only are Bloom and his wife and son part of that last group, they also qualify as outsiders simply because they came from the city.
As Bloom tries to adapt to country ways, there are disconcerting events. Christianity is assumed at Cub Scout meetings he and his son attend. When on Easter morning the Cedar Rapids Gazette runs the banner headline "He Has Risen," Bloom wryly points out to his journalism students that the event "was neither breaking news nor could it be corroborated by two independent sources."
And, in an incident that looks awfully like anti-Semitism, the Blooms are selected by a neighbor to host the watermelon social, and very few people show up.
Feeling stranded in Middle America, Bloom begins to look toward the Hasidim of Postville as a connection to his roots. But making contact is not easy. Their leader, Sholom Rubashkin, does not jump to return Bloom's phone calls.
What's happening in Postville is a more intense, larger-scale version of what Bloom is experiencing in Iowa City. But whereas Bloom tries to blend into the Iowa community, the Hasidim wish to remain apart. Their packing plant is outside the town limits, ungoverned by town laws, untaxed, which rankles the locals.
The Hasidim have been highly successful and brought prosperity to a formerly dying town, yet they are resented. They buy impressive homes but don't mow the lawns in the summer or shovel their sidewalks in the winter. They pass by on the street without speaking. They haggle over prices.
While in the Northeast this behavior would simply mark them as New Yorkers, to the people of Postville, Iowa, it is because they are Jews. A referendum is scheduled to annex the lands where the packing plant is located, making it a part of Postville, giving the community some measure of control. The Hasidim are threatening to leave if it passes.
Bloom eventually visits with the Hasidim, who are welcoming yet admonish him for his assimilation: "The word Hasid comes from the Hebrew, and literally means 'the pious one,' but the Postville Hasidim I had encountered were anything but pious. You couldn't become casual friends with them; it was all or nothing. They required total submission to their schema of right and wrong, Jew vs. Christian - or you were the enemy."
He attends intense temple services with them, yet sees the separation of men and women as a demeaning concept. He cringes when one man boasts of getting something for nothing, of paying his bills only when he feels like it.
Bloom relates all this in easy-reading narrative and as a good journalist pursues every lead, including traveling to the Hasidic community in New York. It's a thought-provoking book in this, a nation of immigrants. The American melting pot has always remained an ethnic stew, with people clinging to their identities. Most immigrant families gradually change their dress and customs, however, and this is where the Hasidim balk. Religion and daily life are inseparable. To them, to assimilate is to disappear.
One wonders how much of this is a reaction to the persecution Jews have endured over the centuries. There is a note of sadness as the referendum passes and Sholom Rubashkin notes of the result, "You know, to be liked by forty-five percent of the people? Hey, that's not bad." To be liked, it seems, is not something he expected.
On a positive note, since the book has come out, a Jew has been appointed to the Postville City Council.