The Workmen's Circle at Seventy-Five
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
ETHNICITY COMES OF AGE The Workmen's Circle at Seventy-Five BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS when the Workmen's Circle—a Lower East Side society that came to symbolize Jewish radicalism—celebrated its...
...The choice of Mayor Beame was a happy one, reflecting as it did the distance (social as well as ideological) that Jews had traveled since their greenhorn days in the sweatshops and tenements of the Lower East Side...
...And where had all the Bundists, Anarchists and Socialists gone...
...Recently the Workmen's Circle's veteran executive-secretary, William Stern, received a routine letter from the National Fraternal Congress requesting information on "the patriotic projects and promotions your society conducts on a regular basis," such as "the sale of United States flags or of patriotic calendars and billfolds...
...That suited the Workmen's Circle, an organization forever addicted to political reforms...
...So: Your average Workmen's Circle member these days may not be a worker or a revolutionary, but where his notion of the American Dream is concerned, he remains deeply committed, a veritable chasid...
...Recently a friend sent me an obscure but splendid quotation on this point—that is, on what it takes for people to remain in control of their destiny: "They must be able to savor ordinary experience, to accept and take pride in their heritage, and be willing to hope that life can be better...
...Gradually, however, as members left the old neighborhood, their Debs-like socialism turned into FDR-like liberalism...
...From its inception the Workmen's Circle understood and preached ethnicity as an honorable cause, decades before liberals discovered its peculiar attractions...
...Only in America...
...And the key to Yiddishkeit was Yiddish itself, a powerfully intimate folk-language that had evolved in the shtetlach—the Jewish towns and ghettos of Russia and Poland...
...It has always surprised me that other fraternal organizations do not realize their great potential for achieving vital social goals of this kind...
...The society's four-page direct-mail brochure is true to Ostroff's word...
...Today a broad translation of Yiddishkeit would be, Jewish is beautiful...
...In no other civilized land in the world," observed the Yiddish writer Abraham Liesin, an early member of Workmen's Circle, "is the fight for survival so menaced by the unexpected and the terrible as in the United States, and in no country is there the feeling of so much insecurity, loneliness and fear of tomorrow...
...These include: an assortment of insurance "packages" (life, health, home, automobile...
...He thereby "opened the doors of politics to the Eastern European Jewish immigrants...
...Abe Beame had been there, too...
...We live in an ethnic age, and the Workmen's Circle is the ethnic child of the century, born in 1900 as the Arbeter Ring, out of a need among Jewish workingmen to enrich their futures without necessarily wiping out their pasts...
...Most of the new branches that spring up are in places like New Rochelle and Larchmont...
...Only near the bottom of the page, under the heading "Fraternalism," does the reader begin to learn about the benefits and services available to members...
...Most of the front page is devoted to "Our mission in life"—a compound of romantic cosmopolitanism ("to help mold a more just and beautiful world in opposition to Communism, Fascism and Bigotry") and of pure-and-sim-ple Yiddishkeit ("We are deeply committed to the perpetuation and enrichment of Jewish life through every form of secularist expression...
...the American emphasis on individualism vs...
...In a philosophical sense we are still a workmen's association, with strong ties to all the major labor unions...
...Sentiment may be one reason...
...low-fee medical and dental care (in New York...
...If this seems like a lot, once upon a time there was more—more local branches, more schools, more members...
...The executive-secretary fired off a characteristically Stern reply: "To us patriotism is not merely displaying the United States flag, but rather devoting ourselves to making this a better America for all its people...
...Consider this turn-of-the-century pronouncement by the society's leadership: "The Workmen's Circle is the best lodge of all the lodges, the best association of all associations, the only society for the worker, where he may be uplifted in spirit and yet deal with his material needs...
...There is a duality in almost every aspect of the Workmen's Circle," notes Shapiro...
...the old-world emphasis on family, clan and tribe...
...yet whenever the time came to organize, debate and plan programs, the people spurned Yiddish in favor of Russian or German...
...Instead they perform ritual acts of patriotism which are superficial in their effect and thus ignore the deep-rooted problems of our time...
...These contradictions are known to every "ethnic": the lure of assimilation vs...
...It is true, in any case, that tens of thousands come to the Workmen's Circle Yiddish music festival in Central Park each summer...
...In addition, the society sponsors the Folksbeine, which claims to be the world's oldest Yiddish theater group, a touring chorus and orchestra, and a mandolin band...
...Moved uptown, every one...
...And now, the Mayor and other speakers seemed to be saying, here we are, the beneficiaries of those early struggles, unexpectedly prospering among the affluent denizens of Murray Hill, rejoicing in the streets and belting out old Yiddish roundelays...
...a children's camp in Duchess County, New York...
...For the benefit of non-Jews, non-New Yorkers and non-nonagenarians, the Workmen's Circle?though it defies easy categorization —resembles a fraternal society, a Jewish Elks Club minus the booze, bingo and Babbittry that such an image may suggest, but with its own special brand of boosterism...
...From the beginning, it embodied both the desire to be part of American society and the determination to correct its evils.' At the outset members tended to practice a militant socialism and to espouse an equally militant atheism...
...ideology is another...
...The motto has political and economic overtones, yet it is essentially an expression of cultural and ethnic solidarity...
...They viewed the latter as consistent with the former, religion being the opiate of the people...
...Who had hushed the thunder on the Left...
...In short, the Workmen's Circle has much to tell us about the art of survival in these United States...
...We want our members to know that...
...From there it began a slow decline, hitting bottom, at 50,000, in 1971...
...New York and its suburbs are the heartland of Workmen's Circle territory, but the society has branches in other places as well, including Toronto and Montreal, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Los Angeles...
...Thus, our patriotic activities are in the line of calling upon Congress and the President to give us full employment a National Health Security bill good housing mass transportation...
...a variety of publications, many in Yiddish...
...a discount buying service...
...the fear of losing one's friends and loved ones, of being alone...
...In truth, the Workmen's Circle, which this month will conclude a year long celebration of its 75th anniversary, does strike one as remarkably American: cheerfully assertive, continuously inventive and, like the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, determinedly ideological...
...It was the genius of the organizers of Workmen's Circle that they found ways to nourish both hope and pride among their members?in part through political action and education, but more importantly through the celebration of Yiddish-keit...
...It was a profoundly personal instrument of communication, its familiar rhythms and inflections suffusing each moment, each thought, each emotion...
...It is the message of mutuality, and while the founders of the Workmen's Circle did not exactly invent that idea, they did help to legitimize its use in New York City and thus pointed the way to later ethnic arrivals...
...Irving Howe, in his forthcoming book on the Jews of New York, speaks of "The Jewish God, to whom one prayed in Hebrew and with whom one pleaded in Yiddish...
...As Judah J. Shapiro points out in a perceptive history of the Workmen's Circle, The Friendly Society, Abraham Cahan—who would later edit the Jewish Daily Forward?changed all that by speaking in Yiddish at political meetings...
...It is also true that for the first time in two generations new Yiddish schools are being organized, mostly in the suburbs...
...The Yiddish language would become the tool for relating Jewish life to the developments in the general society...
...The society's history thus contains many of the poignant contradictions that are common to all non-wasp newcomers, whether they have fled the pogroms of Vilna, the depredations of Alabama, or the poverty of a Naples or a San Juan...
...the pull of the old culture...
...Nevertheless, those who manage the organization are not about to change its name...
...ETHNICITY COMES OF AGE The Workmen's Circle at Seventy-Five BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS when the Workmen's Circle—a Lower East Side society that came to symbolize Jewish radicalism—celebrated its move "uptown" last year to the handsomely remodeled old Harper & Row building on East 33rd Street, the man it selected to deliver the dedicatory address was Abraham Beame, New York's first Jewish mayor and a self-confessed capitalist...
...On the other hand, the society's "determination to correct [America's] evils" seems unimpaired...
...An early, and still extant, purpose of the organization was to rescue Jews from the nondescript ore of the American melting pot by promoting the blessings of Yiddishkeit, a term that originally referred to the culture of Eastern European Jewry...
...It is an organization fueled by a delicate mixture of doctrine and tradition on the one hand, and of accommodation and commerce on the other...
...Membership is gradually climbing again, possibly on the upward currents of a Yiddishkeit revival...
...Besides, it is always easier to explain the past than the here and now...
...My first seventeen years seem longer to me than the fifty-odd since "wrote the Yiddish-American poet Jacob Glatstein...
...There is a tendency among many Workmen's Circle members to reminisce, implying thereby that the society's history may be more significant than its present or future...
...One would place many of them today slightly to the Right of George McGovern...
...group travel plans...
...It is true that one's early years often loom larger (and longer) in retrospect...
...As Harold Ostroff, the society's president, explains: "The name automatically screens out people who may not be sympathetic to our viewpoint...
...the members are American-born and decidedly white-collar...
...and, in about 30 locations, Yiddish schools for both children and adults...
...Still, the circle keeps turning—the Circle keeps changing...
...Implicit in the Workmen's Circle hegira from lower Broadway to Murray Hill is the idea that the best way to achieve the American Dream—at least if you happen to be poor, alone and generally reviled—is to organize, organize, organize...
...Apparently a funny thing had happened to the Workmen's Circle on its way to 33rd Street: Its members no longer craved revolutionary rhetoric...
...These days, for instance, the society enrolls members—it has 54,000—via direct mail, a far cry from the early days when new branches of the society were organized along more "natural" lines?as concomitants of labor union locals or as landsmanshafts, associations of immigrants from the same town or region in the old country...
...and, consequently, the urge to "get ahead" vs...
...We don't want them coming in just to get the insurance or some of the other benefits...
...Clearly, Yiddish was the language best suited to voice the immigrants' deepest aspirations...
...It was as if the language of the hearthside was deemed too private a possession for public use and display...
...Today the organization's "pitch" to prospective members, though less blatantly boastful, makes the identical points...
...Strictly in terms of numbers, the Workmen's Circle reached its peak in 1925 with a membership of 85,000...
...cemetery plots and funeral provisions...
...There are few workmen anymore in the Workmen's Circle...
...What these branches and their members have in common with the dominant New York contingent is simply the mystique of the Circle?the tie that binds—as exemplified by the association's sweetly ingenuous motto, "All for one and one for all...
...As a small boy, he reminded the huge crowd attending the outdoor dedication, he had often accompanied his father to Workmen's Circle forums, where he had listened to speeches by Eugene V Debs, Morris Hillquit, Abraham Cahan and other radical luminaries of the period...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 23
