Copyright 2000 Denver Publishing Company
Denver Rocky Mountain News (Colorado)
November 12, 2000, Sunday
SECTION: Books; Ed. Final; Pg. 3E
LENGTH: 622 words
HEADLINE: HEARTLAND TALE OF INTOLERANCE
BYLINE: By John C. Ensslin
Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America
By Stephen G. Bloom. Harcourt, Inc., 338 pages, $25.
In the spring of 1997, Steven Bloom went in search of his faith and followed his reporter's instincts to a story.
He came back with a book that speaks volumes about what happens when the great American melting pot boils over.
Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America tells the story of a small group of ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews who revitalized a small Iowa town by producing kosher meat in a defunct slaughterhouse. The plant became an economic boon for Postville, which then avoided the withering loss of agricultural jobs that weakened so many other Midwestern towns in the 1980s.
But when Bloom - a onetime Bay Area reporter who had recently become a journalism professor at the University of Iowa - arrived on the scene, Postville was facing an uncertain future.
The meat packing plant had created some 350 jobs. But the Lubavitcher Jews who had arrived from the intensely urban Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., had made almost no effort to blend in with the rural town's 1, 400 residents. An ugly conflict brewed as Postville's residents wrestled with whether to annex the slaughterhouse and bring it under town control.
The Jews threatened to leave if the measure passed. Some fairly anti- Semitic forces in town seemed bent on this prospect, even if it meant slaying the proverbial golden goose.
Bloom enters into this conflict as an outsider to both camps.
At the time, he had been seeking a way for he and his family to reconnect to their Jewish faith. This was tough in a mostly Christian farm area, a place where the local newspaper ran a headline on Easter that read, "He is Risen."
To his dismay, however, Bloom found it hard to connect with the Jews in Postville, who viewed him warily as a journalist.
It is Bloom's own journey between these two worlds and what he learns from both about intolerance that makes Postville a rich and compelling story. The saga of the annexation vote is probably not worth more than a long magazine article. But in telling it as a work of personal journalism, Bloom opens up the story and takes the reader along on his journey.
Along the way, he finds fault with both sides.
At the local coffee shop, he meets one resident who asks Bloom, "Why are they always picking on old (former Cincinnati Reds owner) Marge Schott? Just because she said Hitler did some good things in the beginning. Well he did, damn it."
Bloom does not go easy on the Jews either, some of whom go out of their way to spurn the locals who were sympathetic to the newcomers.
He also finds plenty of heroes in this tale. There is the local minister who uses his pulpit to preach tolerance until it creates a rift within the congregation and he has to leave. And there are some genuinely warm portrayals of the Lubavitchers, most notably Aaron Rubashkin, the Brooklyn butcher who had the inspiration to open the plant.
Bloom lets the narrative move at its own pace, peeling away the layers until he arrives at some very personal truths. At times, however, this pace plods where it should skip. It is as if we are literally retracing Bloom's steps.
And the ending is anticlimatic. It becomes clear as the book progresses which way the town will vote on the annexation. One is left wondering what happens in the next chapter of Postville's history. However, that is beyond this book.
But the journey up to that point is what makes this tale so rewarding. Postville is a compelling story about what it means to assimilate into mainstream American culture - and the price of remaining an outsider.
NOTES:
John C. Ensslin is a staff writer for the Denver Rocky Mountain News.
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Book Cover / POSTVILLE: A CLASH OF CULTURES IN HEARTLAND AMERICA. FILE: UNAVAILABLE. HARD COPY: RETURNED TO THORN