I CLOSE-UP The Jewish Chorus: Voices of the American Jewish Experience Journalist Howard Simons traveled around the United States for four years taping the memories of American Jews. He ended his journey convinced that Jews have come closer to realizing the American Dream than any other group. A book excerpt. HOWARD SIMONS Special to The Jewish News In The Beginning M y paternal grandfather, in whose brownstone I lived my formative years, came to the United States from Ciechanow, Poland, at the turn of the 20th century, a poor, untutored cobbler who spoke no English on his ar- rival and subsequently learned but little. None of his children went to college, but all five of his grandchildren did. When I was young, this to me was the essence of the Jewish experience in the United States, a unique experience, perhaps as extraor- dinary an experience as the Jewish people haVe enjoyed in their long, rich, and burdened history. Only when I was older did I come to realize that for many Jews the hop from somewhere else to the United States would land them in college in a single generational jump and not, as with me, in two. Recently, I began to collect in- formation about America's Jews — anec- dotes, impressions, anthropological shards, what a colleague remembered about his or her family. Nothing formal, never organ- ized, certainly not planned or systematic. Just scraps stuffed in the crannies of the Excerpted from the book, JEWISH TIMES: Voices of the American Jewish Experience, by Howard Simons, published by Houghton Mifflin Company (A Marc Jaffe Book). Copyright © 1988 by Howard Simons. Reprinted by permission. 24 FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1988 mind. I wondered how I could distill the essence of all this information. I did not want to write a formal history; that had been done more than once. In its place I decided to collect bubbe mayses, grand- mother's tales. I would tape-record a wide sample of American Jews, asking each in turn to recall and to recount his or her per- sonal and family history. I set out to trap memory, however imper- fect, in electronic amber. Over a four-year period, I carried my tape recorder across the United States, targeting some places, falling into others. I called on friends — Jews and non-Jews — asking for help, set- ting forth the kinds of people I was look- ing for who would consent to be inter- viewed and share their memories with me for publication. In some cases I knew what I was after — pre-Revolutionary War families, German Jews, merchants, kosher innkeepers, persons raised on the Lower East Side of New York City. In other cases, friends old and new led me to people and places that had been strange to me but turned out to be rich in Jewish heritage. The interviews that follow, with my com- ments, have been culled from all the inter- views I conducted, sometimes because they make a particular point, sometimes because they are inherently interesting, sometimes because they express a series of folkloric memories a tad better than inter- views with others. I came away from this experiential journey more, not less, convinced that the Jewish experience in the United States is indeed unique. Unique in the sense that, more than any other immigrant group, Jews have found their way into almost every interstice of American life, have taken just about every opportunity this nation has to offer, and have given back to America in enriching ways that are won- drous. I think the Jewish immigrants from the very beginning of their time and America's time, have come closer to realiz- ing the American Dream than have any other group. The Jewish premium on fami- ly and religion, hard work and education, charity and public service, is the American Dream. How Jews did it and why they did it is their story. Names hen I questioned people about the derivation of their names, at least a half dozen asked me whether I knew about the Jew- ish man named Shane Ferguson. Well, they would say, the Jewish immigrant would ar- rive at Ellis Island, and when the immi- gration officers there asked him his name, he would shrug his shoulders and say "Shoyn fargesn," which in Yiddish means "Already I've forgotten." W Alan Finberg 56, lawyer, New York, New York There is a wonderful old story in our family. It goes back to when my father's father, as a boy, came to this country from Poland with his father and three brothers, all of them about the same age. They were perhaps in their very early or middle teens. They all came from the same shtetl in Poland. All came in the same boat, steerage, probably holding hands. They came to Boston because some of the fami- ly had come to Boston earlier, so you always go where there is already family. The four boys got off the boat. There was this great crowd at the immigration sta- tion, and somehow they got separated. Each of the four went through a different immigration gate. I should tell you now that when they left Poland their name was Mikiloshansky. When they came through these four sep- arate immigration gates, having been interviewed by four separate immigration inspectors, my grandfather's name was Finberg, which was the name of the mayor of the shtetl. One of his brother's was Friedman. One of his brother's was Red- dinov. And one was Rubinstein. That's the story of the four branches of the family in Boston. None of them went back to Mikiloshansky.