September 24, 2000, SUNDAY, Late Sports Final Edition
SECTION: SHOW; ENDPAPERS; Pg. 13; NC
LENGTH: 1160 words
HEADLINE: The Jewish world in ferment;
Clashing beliefs in rural Iowa
BYLINE: Henry Kisor
BODY:
Just imagine it: Two hundred ultra-Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn's teeming Crown Heights plunked down in the middle of Postville, a tiny (population 1,478) farm town in northeast Iowa. Lubavitcher Hasids in long dark coats, untrimmed beards, sidecurls, fringed tzitzit and wide-brimmed black hats, sharing the same sidewalks with beefy Lutheran farmers in Big Smiths?
It was a meeting of two kinds of very insular people: a sect that strictly forbade any but the most necessary interaction with non-members, and a homogeneous farm community that had never encountered diversity.
But it worked. No, it did not work. Maybe it did, in a way -- if the idea is stretched almost to the breaking point.
In 1987, a Lubavitcher Hasid butcher named Aaron Rubashkin bought an abandoned meat-packing plant just outside Postville, and during the next few years he and his son Sholom turned it into the world's largest kosher slaughterhouse. Suddenly the economic fortunes of Postville, all but Wal-Marted into oblivion, had revived. More than 350 new jobs were created. At first everybody was happy, even those townspeople -- and there were many -- who subscribed to anti-Semitism of the thoughtless and ignorant kind.
But all was not well. Rural Iowans have always had a strong sense of community; they believe that their lives in a difficult land depend on supporting one another. Lubavitchers, on the other hand, believe that anyone who is not a fellow Lubavitcher is trayf, unclean, and that if they are to survive they must shut out the Others.
Instead of responding to a cheery hello on the sidewalk, Lubavitchers would hurry past, heads down. In the local stores they'd try to haggle, and if refused, they'd buy mail order for the best price. They neglected their lawns and drove their cars up on the curb. They didn't care about fitting in. And pretty soon they were buying the best real estate in town.
Soon the people of Postville, feeling that their town's future was slipping through their hands, decided to take more control of their lives. They'd take a vote on annexation of the land outside Postville where Agriprocessors, the kosher plant, stood. "Anti-Semitism!" responded the Lubavitchers, who viewed the move as hostile to them -- as it indeed was. (Actually, the added taxes the plant would have to pay were minuscule compared to its profits.) If the townspeople won, the Jews declared, they'd just move the slaughterhouse elsewhere.
Enter Stephen G. Bloom, a secular Jew from Los Angeles who had recently become a journalism professor at the University of Iowa. He and his family felt they didn't quite belong there. For them the issue wasn't a just matter of finding a good pastrami sandwich, but of coming to terms with what it means to be a Jew in a heavily Christian heartland, where even in the '90s a major newspaper -- the Cedar Rapids Gazette -- could trumpet at the top of Page One on Easter morning, "HE IS RISEN."
Bloom not only smelled a good story in the Postville drama, but also wanted to explore his own neglected religion, to belong. He visited the town frequently and talked to both sides, and the result is Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Harcourt, $ 25). A livelier and more absorbing work of personal journalism I have not read in years.
Much of the reason is Bloom's scrupulous fairness to both sides as well as his ability to get people to open up about themselves. It is hard to believe that the townspeople didn't at first realize a fellow named Bloom would be Jewish, but they didn't. They were frank about their feelings toward the Lubavitchers. Some were just suspicious about outsiders, some were openly hostile to Jews, but most were the good-hearted sort who tried hard to understand and to accept the newcomers.
As for the Lubavitchers, Bloom was what they call a Shabbos goy, a fallen Jew, and they believe that fallen Jews can be redeemed, just as equally self-righteous Christian denominations seek to convert the heathen. The Lubavitchers answered Bloom's questions honestly, all the while urging him to join them. To him and his young son they even opened their homes -- inviting places, full of love and laughter -- but only so long as they thought they could convert him.
But Bloom is a modern American. His heart might have belonged with the devout Jews, but his head agreed with the townspeople. Try as he might to find some common ground with the Lubavitchers, he just could not accept their rigid exclusiveness, their "holy war against assimilation."
"What the Postville Hasidim ultimately offered me was a glimpse at the dark side of my own faith," he writes. ". . . They required total submission to their schema of right and wrong, Jew vs. Christian -- or you were the enemy."
In a powerful passage, Bloom tells how a Lubavitcher who had taken him into his home actually boasted of his sharp business practices against the despised goyim, the kind that "encouraged -- perhaps even created -- wolves like the (anti-Semitic) coffee klatchers at Ginger's." Writing that must have taken courage; there are fellow Jews who will declare that Bloom is digging up dirt on other Jews, even that he is a self-hating Jew.
But Bloom found acceptance of a sort -- his own embrace of the idea that even as a secular Jew he will always be a stranger in a strange land, even though he may adopt and even love the everyday routine of a rural community of non-Jews. Now and then he can always take a trip to Chicago for that pastrami sandwich and for a little luxuriating in the Jewish tradition he misses.
As for the annexation vote, the townspeople won, and the Lubavitchers did not depart but stayed and adjusted themselves to it. It was not a happy victory for anybody. The success of the slaughterhouse has changed the town in several ways. Immigrant (and often illegal) workers get into violent fights. The Lubavitchers continue to buy up property.
But they are there to stay. It's a kind of armed truce.
All this Bloom sets down in a lively, clear journalistic prose that not only is a pleasure to read but also to contemplate. He has a splendid sense of humor; many of his anecdotes about the clash of cultures are comic and well-told. He also has an acute, almost painfully honest sense of self; he is as hard on himself as well as anyone else.
The one complaint I have about this fine book is that Bloom chose not to reveal the results of the annexation vote until the end. That's just creating artificial suspense, toying with the reader's emotions by withholding information. It would not have hurt in any way if Bloom had given the outcome of the vote in his prologue before discussing its consequences in the final chapter.
All the same, Postville is a thoughtful and profound examination of what happens, and is likely to keep happening, as ethnic immigrants invade parts of America that "are wary of newcomers, wherever they are from."
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