Little Shtetl on the Prairie
Yigal Schleifer
What happens when a small Iowa town becomes home to one of the world’s busiest kosher slaughterhouses?
In 1987, a small Iowa farming town named Postville was on its last legs economically when a Jewish butcher from Brooklyn turned things around, buying a shut-down meat-processing plant on the outskirts of town and turning it into one of the world’s busiest kosher slaughterhouses.
The butcher, a Lubavitcher hasid named Aaron Rubashkin, and his slaughterhouse brought 350 jobs to Postville, dramatically improving the town’s prospects. The abbatoir also brought some 150 Lubavitchers to live in Postville (population 1,478), suddenly giving the town, in a state where pigs outnumber people five to one, the distinction of having more rabbis per capita than any other place in the country.
What happened when these two very different communities came to live side by side makes for a fascinating story, which journalist Stephen G. Bloom fell into after he and his family moved to Iowa City -- 125 miles south of Postville -- in 1993, when he became a journalism professor at the University of Iowa.
His engrossing book, “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America,” is the result, the tale of how instead of learning to live together, the two communities came to despise one another.
Bloom, who writes in a clear, unpretentious style and has a keen eye for detail, spent four years visiting Postville — where he soon learned that an uneasy tension had developed between the Jews and the locals. Though the hasidim had clearly saved Postville from becoming yet another down-on-its-luck Midwest farming town, the old-timers felt slighted by the Lubavitchers.
There’s a way things are done in rural Iowa, an unwritten code that governs the way neighbors treat each other, and Postville’s Jewish arrivistes seem to have broken every one of its rules. They don’t say hello in the street, natives complain to Bloom. They don’t maintain their lawns. They try to bargain in the local stores, and they buy their appliances from wholesalers in other states.
In a place where neighborliness is considered next to godliness, many locals, descendants of the area’s original German Lutheran settlers, were put off by what they perceived to be the Lubavitchers’ non-interest in participating in community life. The reverend at the local Lutheran church, who initially welcomed the idea of these religious Jews coming to town, tells Bloom how miffed he was that none of the Lubavitch rabbis ever paid him the common courtesy of calling on him when they arrived in town.
Most of the complaints, Bloom makes clear, are the result of plain old resentment over the Jews’ success. “The Jews breathed life back into Postville,” he writes. “But their success was a kick in the shins to the locals.”
Bloom also points out that plain old anti-Semitism may also play a role. At a morning coffee klatsch Bloom attends, his breath is almost taken away when one local, who doesn’t know Bloom is Jewish, says that the Jews will “take whatever they can get. The Jews, as long as they have their hands in someone else’s pocket, then they’ll stay. That’s their history -- to take as much as they can.”
The Lubavitchers, meanwhile, see the locals as a bunch of ungrateful complainers who are only interested in somehow getting a cut from their success. During Bloom’s time in Postville, the town’s leaders put forward a proposal to annex the land, outside the city limits, on which the plant stood, which would enable Postville to collect taxes from the Rubashkins and give it more control over them.
UNDERNEATH ALL OF THIS lies a more personal dimension for Bloom. After having grown up in a “decidedly Reform” Jewish home in New Jersey and spending all of his adult life in urban centers with visible Jewish communities, Bloom now found himself, and his wife and young son, in decidedly not-Jewish Iowa City. At a Cub Scouts meeting, Bloom is shocked to hear the scout leader offer up a prayer to Jesus. At a dinner in a small town outside of Iowa City, a group of older women look at the olive-skinned and curly-haired Bloom as if he landed from Mars, asking him, “You’re not from around here?” Looking to connect with a Jewish community, and maybe even get a taste of some of the Jewish food he now so missed in Iowa, Bloom initially went to Postville thinking his encounters with the hasidim would reconnect him with the Jewish world. Knowing little about Lubavitch hasidism, or Orthodoxy in general, Bloom set out with rather romantic expectations. But like the Postville old-timers, he found that these brash Brooklynites were cut from a different cloth than him. He may have come looking for a taste of home, but he ended up finding something no less foreign to his own sense of Jewishness than Christian Iowa is.
Bloom follows Postville as the town gears up for a vote on the annexation plan, and as time goes by, he slowly finds himself siding more and more with the locals. At a certain point, he loses his reporter’s objectivity, and this may be the book’s one weakness, even though he does acknowledge it. While the locals are painted vividly but precisely, the hasidim are portrayed with broader strokes. He spends a Shabbat with one family, but Bloom’s hasidim never come off as more than wise-cracking, cantankerous caricatures.
Bloom comes to Postville intent on getting closer to his fellow Jews, but like the locals, he learns that the reality of the Lubavitchers is more complicated, and even darker, than he imagined. A scene in the Postville mikvah is telling. Bloom had envisioned an idyllic pool that would wash away all his sins. Instead he finds a fetid tank inside a cold basement with an oily scum floating on top. “I had choreographed my own plunge, conjuring images of my own life, my own rebirth,” he writes. “Perhaps I would be reunited with my father, who had taught me about my faith, about manhood, about how to be a good father and husband. All these hopes drowned in the reality of the dank basement of the shul.”
Things don’t end so darkly for Postville. Bloom’s book ends with the 1997 annexation vote, won by the “yes” side, bringing the plant into the city limits. But despite threatening to do so, the hasidim did not close the slaughterhouse in response. They are still in Postville, and a détente has developed between them and their Christian neighbors (see box). It is safe to assume, though, that rabbis new to town are still not calling on Postville’s Lutheran pastor.