A History of Jewish Plymouth

A History of Jewish Plymouth. By Karin J. Goldstein. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013. 139 pages. $19.99 (paperback).As Karin J. Goldstein points out at the beginning of her book, the Pilgrims who crossed the North Atlantic on their way to the New World 1620 often compared themselves to the Israelites, fleeing Pharaoh... across the Red Sea (14). A History of Jewish Plymouth reminds us as well that the Jews who made that same ocean crossing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries compared themselves to the Pilgrims. Having chosen, for a variety of reasons, to take up residence the very same town where English Separatists had established New England's first permanent settlement, these Eastern European Jews lived amidst the monuments, landscapes, and legends-not to mention the actual descendants-of Plymouth Colony's founders.The heavily industrialized, urban, and pluralistic America to which these Jews had immigrated was certainly a far cry from William Bradford's howling wilderness, but their imaginations were no less inflamed than those of the town's original settlers. For one thing, the persecution from which these Jews were fleeing was, if anything, more punishing than anything that had been faced by their English predecessors. To have arrived such a land of plenty after so many centuries of deprivation and fear must have come as a shock to them. To have been allowed within that land of plenty to act as full participants its economic life and to continue to live and worship openly as Jews could only have reinforced their sense that the story of the Pilgrims was not an example of mere streets paved with gold mythology.This is not to say that the Jews of Plymouth were welcomed into that storied town with open arms. As Goldstein's book shows, while these immigrants met with relative success and, over time, achieved relative financial stability (at least the years before the Great Depression and after World War II), the Plymouth they lived was not the same Plymouth that the Mayflower descendants inhabited. During the first half of the twentieth century, Plymouth Jews led somewhat separate lives from their gentile neighbors, and their primary interactions with non-Jews, or at least with non-Jews who carried a Yankee pedigree, occurred either an entirely commercial context or within the town's public schools. As had been the case throughout small-town America, and certainly elsewhere New England's non-urban settings, first-generation Eastern European Jews usually started out as traveling peddlers, eventually graduated to retail sales, and-more often than not-spoke Yiddish at home and adhered to some form of orthodoxy that precluded their mixing in with the American masses. It wasn't until the birth of the second generation-in a time period that coincided, for some of the males, at least, with their serving the military during World War I-that Plymouth Jews became American Jews.Goldstein's book is a lucid and substantive chronicle of those early years. …