2. The birth pangs of the Jewish working class
Translation ©2023 Brym & Jany, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0341.02
The birth pangs of the Jewish worker were and remain until now much more severe than those of the surrounding peoples. If physical labour in general was for hundreds of years a curse and an embarrassment in a Jewish family, then working for someone else, an owner, was a double curse and a double embarrassment. Even now it is considered a misfortune, a tragedy for a Jewish boy or girl. One is often prepared to work more and earn less to remain at home working for oneself.
The former peasant who arrives in the city and knocks on the factory door has worn the landowner’s yoke for centuries. He arrives with a healthy body hardened by physical labour and with a soul that has for centuries absorbed subjugation and submission. Having an owner over him, a master one must satisfy, is customary. In contrast, the Jew arriving from a small-town home, the home of a minor storekeeper or broker, a cantor or a beadle, a matchmaker or a person with an undefined occupation living hand to mouth, or even a self-employed tradesman—such a Jew brings with him to the city not only a weaker body but also a mentality that is poorly suited for dependent work, a mentality that resists disciplined, mechanized factory labour. And if in a certain country factory production and home industry appear simultaneously before two work-seeking masses, one consisting of rural peasants and the other of small town mercantile elements, then the latter will certainly choose home industry, which at least offers a modicum of independence and much more hope of improving oneself and hauling oneself up to the level of an owner.
Physically and psychologically, the two work-seeking masses were so different that their paths had to diverge. If one adds to this the cultural distance that separated them as well as their linguistic differences, we arrive at two completely different worlds. Social destiny later brought them together, but in the beginning of their struggle for employment in nascent industry it must have felt that they were more divided than unified.
For the factories, especially those owned by Christians, the rural non-Jewish peasant with his healthy body and primitive mentality, trifling needs and even more trifling ambitions, was much less expensive and easier to employ than the small-town Jewish petit bourgeois mass with its weak body and excitability; with its higher standard of living and more developed mind; with its oversized interest in the mechanism of the enterprise and ready grasp of the cogs of that mechanism; with its emotional liveliness and mental activity; with its striving to free itself as quickly as possible from the worker’s yoke and work its way into the owners class; with its immense drive to become independent, to organize, to create, to manoeuvre, and to accomplish.
If the pauperized peasant masses entered the wide factory doors of large industry, then some of the pauperized small-town Jewish masses squeezed into the offices of the large Jewish-owned factories, where they found better working conditions and more opportunities for upward mobility than in the factory itself. Many more such Jews threw themselves into expanding craft work production and similar home industry. They had strong ties to, and shared traditions with, the latter two branches in the big cities. In those branches they faced less competition than they did in the factories from the physically stronger and culturally less developed peasants. In the springtime of Polish industry, earnings in craft work and even in home industry were higher than in the factory. The work regime was not so hard on the undisciplined and individualistic petit bourgeois mentality. Finally, the prospects for tearing oneself away from the yoke of physical labour and jumping into the ranks of ownership were much greater.
Fig. 2 Brzeziny. A portrait of a tailor and six members of his family, together at work (undated), Brzeziny, Poland. ©Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, http://polishjews.yivoarchives.org/archive/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=22480
The narrow doors of craft work and home work could not permit the entry of all the pauperized petit bourgeois Jews who were compelled to do physical labour. However, the workers’ struggle brought about a more significant improvement in working conditions in the large factories than in the types of industry that came to be known as “Jewish,” the chief feature of which became the sweating system.1 Jewish craft workers therefore tried to enter large industry. However, they found the factories filled with an ethnically unified mass of workers that was difficult to penetrate. It was hard for the individual Jewish worker, a stranger speaking a different language and having different life habits and manners, to integrate into the homogeneous mass of workers of another ethnicity. Besides, the non-Jewish workers had a strong and persistent kinship with the constant influx of peasants arriving from the countryside; they regarded the newcomers as closer than the alien Jews.
In places like Bialystok, where the Jewish working masses arrived at the right time, before the mechanized textile industry was populated by another ethnic group of workers, and where the effort of Jewish workers to enter large mechanized factories was organized and led by a mass movement, a significant result followed: Jews comprise more than one-half of all weavers working power looms until today. Unfortunately, Jewish workers’ organizations did not set themselves the goal of encouraging more Jewish factory employment. More important, the spontaneous drive of the Jewish masses to enter the factories declined in intensity and stubbornness because of the opportunity to emigrate. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, more than a million Jewish members of the labour force migrated from Eastern Europe to America. For a while, America freed the Jewish masses from their historic necessity not only to transition to physical labour but to adapt to the working conditions of the majority and make themselves competitive in the labour market.
However, the material and social improvement that America made possible for millions of Eastern European Jews over a period of half a century has ended. We now live in an epoch when the broad Jewish masses are forced to adapt to the most difficult conditions of the local labour market. The Jewish masses will have to make their second great effort to become equal to the surrounding population not just in terms of doing physical labour but in terms of working in the same conditions and with the same discipline and orderliness.
There stands before me a 64-year-old weaver. He works at Trilling’s factory. The entire first floor with more than 50 looms is occupied exclusively by Jewish male and female workers. The second floor is occupied exclusively by Christian male and female workers. If a loom is vacated on the Jewish floor, the position is filled by another Jew; if a loom is vacated on the Christian floor, it is filled by another Christian. The 64-year-old weaver with a nice patriarchal beard and a stately appearance unlike that of a worker has been working at a loom for 49 years. He weaves and weaves and remains poor. His parents owned a little tobacco factory. He worked there from the age of 13 to 15. He studied in cheder until he was 13 and even now he throws a verse and an aphorism into conversation so one feels he hasn’t torn himself away from a Jewish book his whole life. At 15 he became a weaver and started earning 6 roubles a week. That was a time when Bialystok’s textile industry was growing and weavers were in demand. Boys poured in from the surrounding towns—children from good, well-off families of storekeepers, merchants and Jewish functionaries—to learn weaving. A few became factory owners. Hundreds remained workers. The industry pulled youth into the city and the factory, ridding themselves of an angry father, a strict teacher and starting a life of earning a living and becoming independent. Even now a fire ignites the eyes of the old man when he relates how at the age of 13 he left his cheder and its angry rabbi with his leather whip, and how at 15 he left his parents and started living a free life. One senses from his story how narrow and suffocating it was in the old Jewish family and in the old cheder. With extraordinary pride and courage the grey weaver tells how, in 1906, when his boss threw out his handlooms and together with them also wanted to throw out his Jewish workers, the latter barricaded themselves in the factory and proclaimed: “‘Only over our dead bodies will Christian workers approach the power looms’….More than 25 years I stood in place by the handloom, giving up my best years, and now they want to throw me out! No! Blood flowed and we succeeded!”
The elderly man has six children, all workers. They became carpenters, weavers, and two girls were seamstresses. One son left eight years earlier for Mexico and became a peddler, but the weaver believes that as soon as he familiarizes himself with the country his son will leave the odious peddler role and resume his trade as a carpenter. Speaking with this patriarchal Jewish weaver one feels that here a Jewish work tradition is being created. Manual work is becoming deeply rooted and valued. The inherited chain of doings and dealings, and the notion that “Torah is the best merchandise,” is being broken.
And now we are in the home of a loynketnik.2 He sits at a table in a small room reading Henryk Sienkiewicz3 in Yiddish. In one corner, a stove. In the middle of the room, a table. Around the table are four simple long benches. On the wall are two pictures—Dr Herzl and Medem.4 Near the window hang a pair of tefillin {phylacteries}. Filling a second small room are two beds. To reach the second bed one must crawl over the first one, which stands right beside the door—more accurately beside the hole, because there is no door. The weaver is 57 years old. His parents lived in the countryside, ran a tavern, and traded in grain. In his young years, he studied in a yeshiva and knew gemora quite well but after that, when they ruined his father’s business and took away his tavern, he was forced to go to work. He became a weaver, like many Jewish youth. He worked himself up and before the war he had five of his own looms and employed three workers.
The war ruined his business. He was taken into the army. He deserted, had difficulties, suffered, and in the end emerged alive. After much wandering and torment he returned to his family in Bialystok. He had to start again from scratch. He learned how to work a power loom, but it was difficult to rid himself of his poverty. Between 1925 and 1929 he worked an average of four months per year. At the beginning of 1930 he was unemployed for more than half a year. His wife was lying sick, and his last pennies were spent on her.
His dwelling is wet and cold. When he works six days a week he earns 42 zloty per week. As an unemployed person he receives government support of 12 zloty per week, although they removed him from the list of recipients because he has children who work. He has four sons. One is a Hebrew teacher, a former Zionist. He lived in Israel for several years and came back disappointed. The second son is a carpenter and a communist. The third is an office worker in a business and the fourth is learning a trade. The latter two are Bundists.
All the children read books and newspapers with fluency. The father is the only one who prays. He relates this without anger and without annoyance, and one gets the impression that he himself is not religious but prays only from habit. For that reason, he reads a lot of books. He has read not only all the Yiddish writers but all the works of Tolstoy and Zola that have been translated into Yiddish. The poverty and suffering of such an essentially intelligent man made him a little coarser; his down-at-the-heel appearance conceals his inner intelligence.
And now we are in another weaver’s home. He grew up beside a handloom because his father was a weaver too. His grandfather, a religious teacher in a nearby small town, who taught to the age of 75 and “educated many Talmudic scholars.” The old man wanted to lure his grandson away from his son the weaver and make him into the kind of man who would follow in his footsteps, but that did not happen. At the age of 14, the grandson ran from the gemora to the handloom. It was a period when weavers made a good living, and that is what pulled him into the factory. He worked in one factory for 20 years, lived an intensive political life, and he does not regret leaving the gemora. Little of the gemora remains in him, and aside from a Yiddish newspaper he reads nothing. Four years earlier, the factory in which he worked for 20 years was relocated to Romania. He did not want to move with it, and for two years he was unemployed. Luckily, his wife is a seamstress and earns 15 zloty a week. In 1928 and the first half of 1929 he was able to work and eat to satiety. But he has been unemployed again for the last four-and-a-half months.
His two children are studying in a talmud-torah.5 He considers this a necessity; one cannot leave little children without schooling. In a corner of the home sits the wife’s 70-year-old mother. Thin, pale, with parchment skin, more dead than alive, already three-quarters in the hands of the Angel of Death. She moans not with the usual sound but with a thick, heavy, stomach-deep groan. Her groans strengthen the gloom that hangs over the home. Three charity boxes hang on the walls—one in the name of Rabbi Meir Bal-Nes,6 one for the talmud-torah and one for the Novgorod yeshiva. These were brought into the house by the old woman.
And now I am in a home where I meet a father and his son, both interesting types. Both are weavers, both yeshiva students, and devout until today, people who read and contemplate, living an intense spiritual existence. The father studied in a yeshiva until he was 20 years old. But the gemora did not help him put potatoes in the pot, as he expressed it, so he became a weaver. In Bialystok, weaving was always considered aristocratic work. The son also studied in yeshiva but only to the age of 15, when he also became a weaver. He is well acquainted with the new Yiddish literature and he plays on Peretz’s expression that the greater the merchant, the smaller the Jew: “The more work, the less yeshiva,” he says. The son is already 39 years old and is not just a weaver but also a carpenter. He was already in the land of Israel and learned carpentry for his trip because one cannot earn a living from weaving there.
On the way from Trilling’s factory to the area of Jewish poverty I dart into a workshop of Jewish loynketniks. There were 20 looms belonging to fifteen people in the workshop; five of the loynketniks owned two looms and rented them to others. The workers stopped work and encircled me. Communicating the way they talk is impossible. I witnessed such despondent tears, such heart-rending lamentations, that I departed a broken man.
Here is a young man of 18 years. It is almost impossible to see his eyes; he is thin, short, small, almost without a body. On his head, sparse red hair. He works a rented loom, earning 25 zloty a week, ten of which he pays the owner of the loom. His workday stretches sixteen to seventeen hours and he is happy that he has work at all. Work is available at most for only one-half of the year. And the second half? He is unable to answer that question.
And here stands a tall Jew, 38 years old, but already with a lot of grey hair. He has the face of an energetic, talented man. He speaks abruptly. We are lying in a pit, he says. We are burying ourselves. We run, one in front of the other, to the factory owner, each lowering his price, and we pay with blood, working an extra hour, an extra two hours, an extra three hours. If I work 15 hours a day, another works 16 hours a day and yet another works 17 hours a day, doing more for less. Thus, we drive ourselves to the grave, and no one is to blame because all of us are hungry and all of us have children at home. I have five little ones. The man working beside my loom already has six children. How can we think about attaining something, about health, about exploitation, about organization and other such things?
And here a third man speaks up, an elderly Jew, 60-odd years old, who worked more than 40 years at a handloom and for the last few years at a power loom. He is alone, his wife having passed away long ago, his children scattered over the face of the earth—two sons in Russia, who have completely forgotten their old father, one in New York, who remembers his father once in a blue moon and throws something his way, and one, the youngest, in Mexico, but from him there is still no good news. The old man is nonetheless satisfied that after 50-odd years of toil he has some capital, his own power loom. Tens of others like him are jealous. But how does one find work for at least six months a year?
On the side, still and beaten down, separated from the talkative crowd, stands a type who gives the impression of a man without elbows who has relinquished himself to fate without protest or resentment. He is quiet, but his silence arouses one’s interest. I find out that he was a good student, a well-mannered young man from a very respectable family. In his twenties, the war made him a homeless wanderer. His parents remain stuck somewhere far away in Russia where the homeless were sent after the war began. He has brothers and sisters somewhere, but he has no connection with them and no address for them, and he does not know who among them remains alive and who was swallowed up by the war, the pogroms, the revolution, the terror, the hunger, the epidemics, and thousands of other calamities that in recent years chased people, especially the Jews. He comes from Grodno. During the war he willingly went to Russia. In 1920, during the Russian famine, he managed to escape across the border. More than once he was in the grip of the Angel of Death but miraculously he tore himself away and dragged himself to Bialystok, where he learned weaving. He is working someone else’s loom and earning 15 zloty a week, living absolutely alone. He is always silent.
Let us now consider the moods of the Jewish worker and factory owner, moods which clearly indicate that the distance between the Jewish and non-Jewish workers is disappearing. On the one hand, the Jewish worker is changing markedly in his material demands and his psychological position, lowering himself to the position of the non-Jewish majority. On the other hand, urbanized cultural elements are growing among non-Jewish workers, who are beginning to reach the demands and aims of the Jewish worker.
A Jewish owner of a department store in Germany with tens of branches was asked why he did not hire a single Jewish clerk. He answered cynically but accurately as follows:
Business is business! I need clerks who are immersed in their work when they come into the store, so while they are there they won’t have other thoughts. They must have no thoughts about how they can steal out to the library during the day to exchange a book, run to language or other courses right after work, or attend professional or political meetings. We do not need people whose feet are in the store and whose heads are elsewhere! Nor do we need people who stick their nose where it doesn’t belong—in the accounts and in the names of the firms that supply merchandise or receive merchandise, who want to know every last detail about the business, who don’t want to remain in their proper place and receive only their due. The business needs calm, disciplined, simple people, not people who are intelligent and overly cunning. The Jewish clerk is anything but simple and calm, and he is always thinking about how he can become a boss himself.
Here we have a key to understanding many of the reasons that make the Jewish employee, whether a factory worker in Lodz or a store clerk in Germany, undesirable. Listen to the words of a Jewish worker in Lodz. At a meeting of several tens of Jewish textile workers, an elderly man who has been working a loom for nearly 30 years said the following:
In 1905 or 1906, when I started working in the factory, I immediately started organizing the workers for a strike. I had nothing to fear. If they fired me I could stay in my father’s home or I could immigrate to America. It is completely different now. The Jew works like the devil. There is no place to move to. These days a father cannot support a son. Getting a position is more difficult for a Jew than for a non-Jew. So today a Jew is afraid of losing his job and tries to protect it more than a non-Jew does. He surrenders, becomes calmer, quieter, dependent. Not long ago I started work in a new factory. The first day the owner called me to the side and said: “I hired you even though you are a Jew. However, see to it…”—he didn’t need to finish his sentence. We understood one another, and the factory owner was satisfied.
The non-Jewish worker also changed, but in another sense. He is no longer the peasant from the countryside who is ready to work 12–14 hours a day, lacks cultural needs and is politically passive and psychologically dependent and servile. He has lived in the city for 30 years and is used to better living quarters, a better suit of clothes, a newspaper, a professional union, a movie. He has a child in public school or even a high school. He has children in state or community jobs. He feels like a citizen of his country and his city. He does not want to work more than eight hours a day even if he does piece work. He does not fear unemployment because, firstly, he can count on state support and, secondly, nearly every non-Jewish working-class family has a member in a state or community job—with the railroad, the streetcar company, a municipal enterprise and so on. Unemployment is not as tragic a situation as it is for the Jewish worker, who has no one in a state or community job.
The life of the entire Jewish family depends completely on the father’s earnings. Today’s non-Jewish worker is therefore sometimes more audacious than the Jewish worker. Moreover, the Jewish worker feels responsibility for the entire Jewish work force. If one Jew works poorly, employers might soon say that Jews in general are not good workers, that they are lazy. The Jewish worker senses that the owner is keeping an eye on him, examining him, testing him, suspecting him. The owner makes a big fuss over every little thing that would amount to nothing if it concerned a Christian worker and is ready to blame it on Jewish workers in general. The Jewish worker must endure examination in the large factory and he musters all his psychological and physical resources not to fail. He therefore works zealously and submissively. This is a condition that the non-Jewish worker does not know.
Here is what a middling Jewish factory owner in Lodz told me:
Years ago, there was an interest in recruiting Christian workers and not Jews. In the very large factories that tradition remains, but in the smaller factories Jews are now more readily employed. The Christian worker is lazy—he doesn’t want to work overtime and he runs to the inspector to report that a factory is demanding more than eight hours of work per day. He is eager to complete the required 20 weeks of work so he can claim state support as an unemployed person, and he is happy to remain without work and receive state support for months on end. The Jew is more diligent, ready to work 12 hours a day so long as he can earn more. He does not turn so gladly to unemployment support and does not receive it so easily either. He does not count his number of work weeks or demand that he be immediately registered for unemployment insurance. It is easier to get along with the Jewish worker than with the non-Jewish worker, who will immediately denounce his employer to the authorities for failing to register him immediately.
All factory doors are open for the non-Jewish worker as if he is a man of esteemed descent. For the Jewish worker, almost all doors are locked, so he holds on for dear life where he has a job. The non-Jewish worker must be paid in cash while the Jewish worker also takes a promissory note. The Jewish worker is more productive because he wants to earn enough to support his whole family while, among non-Jewish workers, wives and children are more likely to work. The Jewish worker would also immediately send his wife out to work if he could, but in recent years it has been difficult to find jobs, and the Jewish woman is less suitable and less used to working. But in this detail, too, much has changed. The Jewish woman and girl strive to work, and Jewish girls, many of them educated and from good families, now comprise most workers in the new knitting industry. In Lodz and the surrounding towns there are now 300 workshops producing sweaters. More than 90% of the workers are Jews, and there are a lot more female than male workers.
The Jew wants desperately to work. Many are glad to do unskilled labour and do so with blood and sweat just to earn something. Their honourable upbringing means nothing now; just to live like an ordinary person they are ready to work on the Sabbath, on a religious holiday, day and night. A Jew who sets out to do something does it with fire in his belly, and you will see that Jews will also push into the big factories. It will be difficult, but the world is turning. There is no place to go so they adapt. They are no longer little princes devoted to long years of study, lords of the gemora. A new world has been created and the Jews must change. Hundreds and thousands of Jewish boys and girls come to Lodz from the provinces—the boys from the gemora and the girls from their mothers’ aprons—and after three months one cannot recognize them. They have become different people. They learned to work the sewing machine and a new soul was born. Life tinkers, and it will soon fashion something. Meanwhile it is bitter and dark; everyone wants work and jobs are scarce. Every position for a Jew is obtained with great effort, but things keep moving on, and before my eyes Jewish life has changed a lot, become more gentile, more ordinary, coarser, but also healthier and somehow more respectable. And I’ll tell you another secret. I employ only Jewish workers because I think to myself, what good does it do me if the workers hate me both as an owner and a Jew? It is enough that they hate me as an exploiter. I feel somehow more secure and calm with a Jewish worker.
It later emerged that this factory owner was in his youth a member of a Jewish socialist party and is familiar with the painful problems and questions of Jewish economic life in general and the life of the Jewish worker in particular. There a few more Jewish factory owners and workers involved in our discussion but they all agreed that the speaker had correctly characterized the situation and shone a bright light on it.
We let living people speak and we recounted what they said practically word for word. What follows from all this talk? First, the higher cultural position of the Jewish manual worker or salaried employee (his more developed personality and sense of self-worth, his more acute grasp of his class situation, his stronger striving to release himself from the yoke of class subjugation) makes him less desirable in the factory or the business. But, however difficult it becomes to remove oneself from the status of salaried worker, however gloomy the situation of the Jewish masses becomes, there grow among the Jews more elements that are willing to adapt to the cultural situation of the surrounding non-Jewish majority and existing working conditions and demands. On the other hand, the development of the wage workers who dominate the surrounding world ensures that the distance between Jewish and non-Jewish wage workers becomes smaller and smaller.
Second, it is clear that in Poland, where the economic crisis among the Jewish population reached its highest and most tragic level, there occurred a deep rupture in the psychology of the Jewish masses, including that of the Jewish working masses. The drive to large industry and work in general has assumed such a spontaneous character and such massive proportions that it will overcome both internal and external stumbling blocks. The adaptive capacity of the Jewish masses will reveal itself here too, especially when it is spurred on by a need that has almost no equal. And to the degree that the surrounding economic situation will allow it, larger Jewish masses will probably force themselves into new branches of industry and higher industrial forms.
Third, we can acknowledge that the rupture in the psychology of Jewish workers and the drive of the Jewish masses to work have already caused a partial change in the relationship of the Jewish entrepreneur to Jewish labour. Even if a long road remains before Jews enjoy equal rights in large Jewish-owned industry, we are far from the absolute boycott of Jewish work that dominated a few years ago.
1 {The sweating system involved owners supplying workers with raw materials and paying them by the piece to complete work in their homes or small workshops. It was characterised by long hours, low wages, and unsafe and unsanitary working conditions.}
2 {A piece worker who spins thread or weaves cloth from material provided by a factory owner. He may own or rent his equipment. He works at home or in a small shop.}
3 {Poland’s 1905 Nobel Prize winner in literature.}
4 {Theodor Herzl was the founder of political Zionism, Vladimir Medem the leading theoretician of the Bund, the main Jewish socialist party in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia.}
5 {A Jewish elementary school modelled after the cheder and preparatory to study in a yeshiva.}
6 {A second century miracle worker.}