Hometown Societies in the New World: Jewish Landsmanshaftn and Americanization

Jacob Sholts, a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Empire, wandered dejectedly through the streets of New York in 1904. Sholts, who had fled Russia to avoid military service during the Russo-Japanese War, could not keep a job. He felt keenly his “greenness”—his inability to adjust to his new country and its language. He could think of nothing but going back. But then, “something else happened, something extraordinary, that affected me very strongly and completely knocked out of my head the idea of returning”:

This is what happened. During the months that I was hanging around like that, my landslayt [people from the same town in the old country] brought me into a society. And there I was, sitting at a meeting, when one of the members—a man with a very good appearance—was speaking about a question very intelligently, nicely, and logically in good . . . Yiddish. I asked who this man was. When I was told his name my mind was changed completely—my thoughts about going back disappeared.

What had happened? Here I must tell a little of the past of this man, the speaker at the meeting who had made such an impression on me. He was a childhood landsman [a person from the same town in the old country] of mine, from the same street and from the same synagogue. As children we kept far away from each other. He was very poor, of a bad, even ugly appearance—dirty and ragged. He attended neither a traditional nor a modern school. It is unlikely that he could even read the prayers, though he used to hold the prayerbook open. I quickly left him behind and forgot about him until this encounter at the meeting.

So, my whole way of thinking took a turn. A poor boy there! A fine, intelligent householder here, with a nice family and fine children! Dirty there! How clean and neat he is here! Of ugly appearance there! How nice and respectable he is here! . . .

How could all of this have happened—this change from there to here? And then and there I decided no longer to think of going back. Here in America, in this free land, with all opportunities for everyone equally, here is my home. I shook off the last bit of dust from the old country.

Sholts went to night school to learn English, and soon bought a candy store in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.[1]

It may seem strange that Jacob Sholts began his process of Americanization in an immigrant organization that conducted its affairs entirely in Yiddish, an organization whose members all hailed from the same old-world hometown. But this was not uncommon. In fact, this type of organization often served this role, allowing the immigrants to Americanize in their own language, on their own terms, and among familiar faces.

Sholts was one of nearly two and a half million Jews who immigrated to the United States between the 1870s and the 1920s. They came from all over Eastern Europe—from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires as well as the Kingdom of Romania. They came from hundreds of small market towns but also from big cities. Most came through the port of New York and, though many went elsewhere, the majority settled in the city. They shared much in terms of culture and language, but they were a more diverse lot than was often apparent to outsiders. Even their common Yiddish language was marked by a variety of dialects.

The “society” that Sholts joined was a landsmanshaft. In Yiddish, a land is a country and a man is a man, so a landsmanshaft is a body of men (or people) from the same country—compatriots. Landsmanshaftn (plural) were, in fact, the most widespread type of organization among the newcomers. There were some 3,000 in New York alone, with hundreds more in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, and other places where Jewish immigrants settled. They enrolled hundreds of thousands of members, and, when families of members are included, touched the lives of the majority of immigrants. Jews were not the only group that organized in this way; many immigrant groups formed town, county, or regional associations.

The landsmanshaftn were, ironically, very American organizations. Their constitutions were modeled after those of similar American mutual-aid societies, and members learned proper American standards of organizational life from Yiddish-language “how to” pamphlets and articles in the Yiddish press. Democracy was a core value. The world from which the immigrants had come was one dominated by a hierarchy of wealth, learning, and pedigree. But here in America, at least in the landsmanshaft, anyone could be a secretary, a treasurer, or even a president! As one activist put it concerning his own group, “The Oshmener society was the melting pot which remolded us and made us into better and different people.”[2] In other words, it helped turn them into people capable of acting as free and equal citizens of a democratic country.

The constitutions also defined the type of society. Some were religious and maintained a space for prayer services. Others adopted radical political orientations. Still others affiliated with larger fraternal orders, their members joining the lodge culture that attracted millions of American men and hundreds of thousands of women. In most societies, formal membership was open only to men, though some were mixed, and there were women’s auxiliaries and independent associations as well. Because of this diversity, one town might be represented by several groups—one radical, one religious, etc.

But whatever its ideological leanings, and though it carried the name of a town in Eastern Europe, the landsmanshaft’s primary role during the years of peak immigration was to help its members adjust to life in the new country. This it did through both material and social benefits. Materially, the societies engaged doctors to treat members at low cost, aided the unemployed, maintained cemetery plots and provided funerals, and offered “death benefits” to survivors. This was not top-down charity, but mutual aid, to which all members were assumed to contribute and from which all could benefit in times of need. The societies also offered a venue for socializing. In the summer there were picnics, and in the winter, theater parties, balls, and banquets. Trophies, plaques, and even ads in the newspapers offered honor and recognition—scarce commodities in the lives of immigrant workers and shopkeepers.

After World War I, the societies came to the aid of their hometowns. But even this renewed contact with the old country furthered their members’ Americanization. Relatively safe and prosperous, the Americans realized how different they had become from their compatriots in the old home. As one writer put it, “We look at things and people a little differently than they do. They don’t understand our way of thinking. Their psychology is very different.” And as another recalled, society members had “lost their greenness through the war.”[3]

The hometown societies proved to be a one-generation phenomenon. Although a few managed to attract members of the second generation, most did not. After all, the immigrants’ American-born children had little need for the kinds of benefits the societies provided, and even less desire to bond over old-country memories. By the twenty-first century, only a few hung on, functioning primarily as genealogical societies. But in their heyday, the thousands of hometown associations helped their members adjust to their new lives and formed an important, if somewhat ironic, venue for their Americanization.

Daniel Soyer is professor of history at Fordham University, contributing editor and translator (with Nancy Green, et al.) of Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora (University of California Press, 1998), and author of Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939 (Harvard University Press, 1997; paperback: Wayne State University Press, 2001).

[1] Jacob Sholts, Autobiography #5, American-Jewish Autobiographies, RG 102, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

[2] William Bakst, “Ikh bin an Oshmener fun Oshmene,” in I. E. Rontch, ed., Di idishe landsmanshaften fun Nyu York (New York: Yiddish Writers Union, 1938), 168.

[3] Letter from S. Tenzer, Records of the Works Progress Administration Historical Records Survey - Federal Writers’ Project, box 3627, New York City Municipal Archives; Horodishtsher barg (New York: United Horodyszczer Relief Organization, 1920), 21.