"They Always Kept One Token Jew" Bieganski Interview # 6

My Dad sometimes talked about his experiences with anti-Semitism as a young man after he’d left the orphanage. When he served in WWII, for instance, he was stationed in Georgia for basic training. When some fellow soldiers found out he was Jewish, there were certain comments made that my father chose to ignore. After the war, when my father was looking for work back in Chicago, he happened to apply for a job at a title & trust company. The man who gave him his job explained to him that they usually don’t hire Jews, but their one Jew on staff was retiring, so they had an opening. They apparently always kept one token Jew to keep up appearances.

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"To Chew Someone Down" Bieganski Interview #1

"Poles are Inherently Comic Janitors" Bieganski Interview # 2

"My Father Began to Conceal His Jewish Origins" Bieganski Interview # 3

They Worked Like Moles Their Whole Lives Bieganski Interview # 4

"She Never, and I Mean Never, Threw Anything Away" Bieganski Interview # 5

"She Never, and I Mean Never, Threw Anything Away" Bieganski Interview # 5

My mother's sister Mabel was a trip. She was the cheapest person anyone knew. Her antics still crack me up, to this day. Some of it is rather ugly – like the fact that she wouldn't come to my grandfather's funeral because he died in New York and she was in Florida at the time and planning on coming back a month later. Therefore, she didn't want to spend the money for the ticket to turn around and come right back. Her husband, my uncle Morris, did pretty well over the years. They had a house in Florida, one in the Catskills, and for a long time, a co-op in NYC. The way she behaved clearly came from childhood. Whether she got it from her parents or from growing up during the Depression, I'm not really sure.

I always said that if I were going to be a stand-up comic, Aunt Mabel would be my best material and then I'd be done. She was notorious for never, and I mean never, throwing anything away. After her funeral, when we went back to the house for the shiva, I was helping clean up in the kitchen, washing some dishes. I picked up the little dishrag that was sitting behind the faucet. It felt funny, like not an absorbent texture or something. I un-wadded it and held it up. It was the armhole of a bra. She took an old bra, cut the cups off (lord only knows what she did with those!), and used the remainder to do dishes.

When they were kids, her daughter told me, if they used Q-tips, she and her brother would have to break them in half. Otherwise, my aunt would grab them out of the trash, pull off the "used" cotton, and put them back in the container (ick!). The original recycler, my mother used to call her.

Aunt Mabel used to steal, too. She told us (and anyone else who would listen) that she paid for the carpet in her house with all the money she didn't have to spend on Sweet 'n' Low over the years because she stole it from restaurants. Apparently, she's not alone. If you go to south Florida – not South Beach where the swanky folks hang out, of course – and you want Sweet 'n' Low or Equal or whatever, you have to ask for it. And they will only bring you 2 packets at a time.

I also am the proud owner of several sets of Eastern Airlines flatware. When I moved into my first apartment in college, Aunt Mabel asked me if I needed silverware. I should have known better, but I didn't have any so I said, "sure." The stuff she gave me was such junk that, if I left it in the stainless steel sink overnight, it would rust. So, the next year, I got ready to move into a new apartment. I was at her house over spring break, and she asked me again if I needed silverware. I must have made a face (thinking about the rust!) because, before I could say anything, she jumped in with, "Oh, no. This is not like last time. This is the good stuff. This is from the airlines!"

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"To Chew Someone Down" Bieganski Interview #1

"Poles are Inherently Comic Janitors" Bieganski Interview # 2

"My Father Began to Conceal His Jewish Origins" Bieganski Interview # 3

They Worked Like Moles Their Whole Lives Bieganski Interview # 4

"They Worked Like Moles Their Whole Lives" Bieganski Interview # 4

Source

Bill is a 33 year old first year graduate student. He hails from "the heart of the anthracite coal region" in Pennsylvania. His ancestors were Lemkos, an ethnic group from the Carpathian mountains who were ethnically cleansed from their region by Soviet Communists.

Bill's grandfather died at 42. Bill illustrated with his hands and a salt shaker, on the table that divided us, his grandfather encountering "some of his buddies from Galicia" on the street.

"They would take ten steps toward each other, and then stop, and then take ten more steps, and then stop. Eventually get close enough to talk. They didn't have enough air in them to cross the street. They all had black lung. Cars would have to stop when my grandfather tried to cross the street."

"I have it pretty good now, but if it wasn't for my grandfather coughing up blood...My uncle Frank; we used to keep a bag next to him for everything he coughed up. I make him out like a martyr. He was kind of a jerk. He used to hit my ciocia (aunt) Marie."

"A lot of our family died in the mines." In another accident a mine caved in on Bill's dad and his buddies. Bill's great grandfather fell into an unprotected mine fan; Bill illustrated with his hands how this man's body was scattered by the whirling blades.

"They never complained. They remembered funny things. My grandmother was cleaning a lawyer's house. He came home with a quart of ice cream. She'd never seen ice cream before. She put it in the closet. A little later, he asked for it....A lot of these kinds of stories floated around. They were told in a very good way. Not to demean the person...They were funny, loving stories. We told Polak jokes. I don't wanna say 'the dumb Polak...' it was more the innocent immigrant..."

Bill has searched out historical documents of his ancestors' experience. He paraphrased one: "'In this school we will not tolerate ethnic differences; therefore, all children of Ukrainian decent will not be allowed to pray before class. If we hear a kid speaking Polish with his brother, we will make sure it never happens again.'"

People's names were changed arbitrarily by teachers and other Americans in power. "There was a guy named Blank. We used to think, maybe at Ellis Island they couldn't get his name, so they pout it down as 'Blank.'"

"It's only since I've been researching it that I am getting a sense of how shitty things were. My mom'd say, 'They had it rough.' She wouldn't report that there were seventeen of them living in a room in a shack...at least in Galicia they weren't laying in a wet eighteen inch shaft their whole life...In many years more went back than came. At least there they had clean air..."

Coal dust is a constant in Bill's town; his mother complains that, "You wipe a windowsill, and a half hour later it's black again." Bill reports that there are towns in this region where pollution is so bad that people require carbon monoxide monitors in their homes.

"I don't feel like I have anything coming to me. That experience was shared by so many people. I don't feel so much that I'm owed something, but that I owe...I get choked up about it. This sense of debt comes over me...that's one of the reasons I'm here, to learn my history. I'll talk to my grandparents in my mind and tell them what I'm doing for them."

***

"To Chew Someone Down" Bieganski Interview #1

"Poles are Inherently Comic Janitors" Bieganski Interview # 2

"My Father Began to Conceal His Jewish Origins" Bieganski Interview # 3

"My Father Began to Conceal His Jewish Origins" Bieganski Interview #3

Informant was a forty-year-old Jewish female from the American south. Her father was American-born, with Eastern European Jewish immigrant grandparents.

***

We children were never told my father was Jewish.

I had inklings from an early age that he was. I had a crush on a Jewish boy in my school in first grade and told him my father was Jewish. When I told my mother this, she seemingly angrily told me my father was *not* Jewish.

I always wondered why my father's relatives, who we saw regularly, seemed Jewish albeit secularly so! So I wasn't surprised when a cousin revealed the 'truth' when I was in college, but for some reason my siblings were shocked that we'd been lied to. A few years before he died, one of my sisters asked him why he'd never told us. We'd never confronted him or my mother about it before, and he was surprised it mattered to us and said so. He gave the reason as being that he didn't think of himself as a Jew.

But when he was dying a few years later, he talked to that same sister and I about how he had suffered discrimination when he first went out into the world to find work -- this was during the Depression in New York. There were "No Jews" signs in businesses and also prospective employers could and did ask religion and Gentiles refused to hire Jews. He finally felt he'd never work unless he lied and -- interestingly -- he asked the family rabbi if it was OK to lie, despite having renounced his religion. The rabbi quoted something from the Torah about it being OK if one's survival was at stake, and so my father began to conceal his Jewish origins. He seemed to feel very guilty about this when he told us this story. All of this complicates anything I might tell you, but I will do my best to answer your questions nonetheless!

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"To Chew Someone Down" Bieganski Interview #1

"Poles are Inherently Comic Janitors" Bieganski Interview # 2

Bieganski Interview # 2: Poles are "Inherently Comic" "Janitors."

Source

INFORMANT INTERVIEW # 2 "Inherently Comic Janitors." 

Informant was Jewish American and male.

I grew up in a town where there was a very large Polish population. There were two separate Polish parishes and a whole part of town was inevitably referred to as the “Sout’ End” in tribute to Polish-Americans accents.  

It was assumed, and acted on, that Polish people were 1) inherently comic, 2) naturally janitors, auto mechanics, mill workers, etc.--but the women made great, meticulous and conscientious, almost comically so, secretaries, and 3) hopelessly provincial/dumb. 

If you directly asked the people who lived by these assumptions whether Polish people were inherently comic, natural janitors, or hopelessly provincial, they would be horrified.  “No!  Of course not!  Don’t be ridiculous!  There are many Polish doctors and lawyers.  Our janitor Stash (i.e., all Polish men whose names they don’t really know) has a nephew in med school”  (Subtext: Of course WE don’t happen to know them) “but it’s silly and wrong to have such prejudices about people.”

***

Twenty years ago, in Bloomington, Indiana, I conducted informant interviews with Jews and Poles* for my book Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype.

My goal was to discover how "the folk," that is, average Jews and Poles, thought and felt about their own identities and the identities of ethnic others.

I solicited informants by hanging signs in public places in Bloomington. IU Bloomington is a major research university and informants came from across the US and Canada. Informants ranged in age from the teens to the sixties.

I told informants that I was working on my dissertation and would eventually publish, and include some of their quotes. They signed a form permitting this.

Informants mostly came to my house and sat across from me on a couch. I served tea and homemade cookies. I audio-recorded the interviews and transcribed them by hand at the same time. I later typed up these transcripts while listening to the tapes.

My questions were mostly open-ended. For example, I asked, "Have you ever looked across a room and thought to yourself, 'That person is Polish' or 'That person is Jewish,' and, if so, why?"

At the end of the interview, I asked more directed questions, such as, "You need brain surgery. You have a choice between two brain surgeons, both of whom have comparable resumes. One is named Dr. Smith. The other is named Dr. Kowalski. Which do you choose, and why?"

And I also asked, "You are on a TV game show. You have just won an all-expenses paid trip to Poland. How do you feel?"

I ended up having much more material than I could use in the book. I'll be posting some of the material on the blog. Informants will remain anonymous. Names are changed and some locations will be changed (to nearby locations) or removed.

The reader should understand that I offer these interview excerpts as reflections of how average people think and feel in a given moment. Nothing here is carved in stone. Informants told me that they could change their mind about the topics, or debate either side.

Sometimes informants told Jewish jokes, Polak jokes, or made other racist comments. I don't share this material to endorse it, but to offer insight into what one person was thinking on one day in 2000 in Bloomington, Indiana.

* Regarding the terms "Jews" and "Poles." I conform to standard usage in scholarly and popular discussion of Polish-Jewish relations. "Jew" means someone whose ancestors were Jewish, even if the person self-identifies as an atheist. "Poles" refers to someone whose ancestors were Polish but not Jewish. I do not use these terms to be exclusionary, and neither do most scholars. Of course we recognize and honor Jews who identify as Polish as well as Jewish.

Bieganski Interview #1: "To Chew Someone Down"

Source

Twenty years ago, in Bloomington, Indiana, I conducted informant interviews with Jews and Poles* for my book Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype.

My goal was to discover how "the folk," that is, average Jews and Poles, thought and felt about their own identities and the identities of ethnic others.

I solicited informants by hanging signs in public places in Bloomington. IU Bloomington is a major research university and informants came from across the US and Canada. Informants ranged in age from the teens to the sixties.

I told informants that I was working on my dissertation and would eventually publish, and include some of their quotes. They signed a form permitting this.

Informants mostly came to my house and sat across from me on a couch. I served tea and homemade cookies. I audio-recorded the interviews and transcribed them by hand at the same time. I later typed up these transcripts while listening to the tapes.

My questions were mostly open-ended. For example, I asked, "Have you ever looked across a room and thought to yourself, 'That person is Polish' or 'That person is Jewish,' and, if so, why?"

At the end of the interview, I asked more directed questions, such as, "You need brain surgery. You have a choice between two brain surgeons, both of whom have comparable resumes. One is named Dr. Smith. The other is named Dr. Kowalski. Which do you choose, and why?"

And I also asked, "You are on a TV game show. You have just won an all-expenses paid trip to Poland. How do you feel?"

I ended up having much more material than I could use in the book. I'll be posting some of the material on the blog. Informants will remain anonymous. Names are changed and some locations will be changed (to nearby locations) or removed.

The reader should understand that I offer these interview excerpts as reflections of how average people think and feel in a given moment. Nothing here is carved in stone. Informants told me that they could change their mind about the topics, or debate either side.

Sometimes informants told Jewish jokes, Polak jokes, or made other racist comments. I don't share this material to endorse it, but to offer insight into what one person was thinking on one day in 2000 in Bloomington, Indiana.

* Regarding the terms "Jews" and "Poles." I conform to standard usage in scholarly and popular discussion of Polish-Jewish relations. "Jew" means someone whose ancestors were Jewish, even if the person self-identifies as an atheist. "Poles" refers to someone whose ancestors were Polish but not Jewish. I do not use these terms to be exclusionary, and neither do most scholars. Of course we recognize and honor Jews who identify as Polish as well as Jewish.

***

INFORMANT INTERVIEW # 1 "TO CHEW SOMEONE DOWN."

I was in college the first time I ever heard the expression to "Jew someone down." And, I don't mean to sound like an idiot, but I didn't know what it meant because I kept thinking they were saying, "chew." Which kinda made sense, no? Oy.

Oh, I know who I should tell you about. He made a big impression on me, and really damaged my positive Jewish identity for a long, long time. My mother met, started dating, and moved in with a man named Harry. Well, rather, he moved in with her. He was good-looking, smart, and charming in a way, I suppose. They lived together for about 6 years, and though he's changed a lot (and not for the better), they are still friends. He and I aren't friends anymore, but we were for quite a while. I think it must have been because, somehow, he believed in me when it didn't feel like anyone else did.

I don't mean to get into stupid family crap – that isn't the point of what you are doing – but I think it's important to understand why he was able to have such a strong influence on a part of me I now think of as unshakable. And, also, quite frankly, I'm ashamed of how much I allowed myself to be influenced by his hateful views.

As I say, he was charming, and funny. He was selling cars in Ft. Lauderdale. Many of his clients, or potential clients, were Jewish and he despised them. They were "beaters." Whom they were supposed to be beating, I'm not really sure. He would do impressions of them, individuals, couples, whatever. The thing is, for a while, we (my mother and I) laughed. After a point, though, the comments, the put-downs just got tiresome. He used to tell us that my mother and I were the only Jews he liked. But then, according to him, we weren't really Jewish – whatever that meant. Probably that we didn't do or buy things just because they were cheap.

I don't feel like I'm doing his influence justice. It's so difficult to explain now. Or rather, it seems like we – my mother – shouldn't have stood for it. Yet we did. The point is, it took me years to get back a sense that being Jewish was a positive thing, that it should be cherished, celebrated. The part that makes me ashamed is that I let someone make me believe that my people really were just ugly.

It's amazing how different I feel now. I still don't believe in god, but I sometimes think I would like to join a temple and go to services. How can I explain it? You know how, when you meet someone who comes from a similar cultural background, you just understand certain things about each other without having to explain them or even say them out loud? I have a friend at work like that and we joke about stuff all the time, not realizing that others who are with us don't understand what we are talking about. We don't mean to be rude – we just get it.

"Final Account" New Documentary by British Filmmaker Luke Holland

Source

There's a new documentary out about the Holocaust. It's called "Final Account." Directed by Luke Holland, a British filmmaker. I have not seen it. I'd like to see it. Article here