Baltimore's Eastern European Jewish

ABSTRACT Title of thesis: A CONSUMING HERITAGE: BALTIMORE’S EASTERN EUROPEAN JEWISH IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY AND THEIR EVOLVING FOODWAYS, 1880-1939 Charlotte Louise Sturm, Master of Arts, 2013 Thesis directed by: Professor Lisa R. Mar Department of History This study explores how Baltimore’s Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their American-born children engaged with American foodways during the period 1880- 1939. Food-related charitable aid and food education were used as tools of Americanization and moral uplift by public health officials, middle-class charitable workers, and social reformers between 1880 and 1920. The home economics classrooms of Baltimore’s public schools continued this work in the early twentieth century, teaching the immigrants’ American-born children lessons about food and middle-class domesticity. Although somewhat influential in reshaping the immigrants’ food habits, the Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children largely retained their traditional foodways, making their own choices about how to adopt American foodways. Interconnected issues of food, health, economics, middle-class domesticity, citizenship, and identity are evident in this study. Using sources such as cookbooks and oral histories, this study demonstrates how foodways expressed and continue to express Jewish, American, and Jewish American identities. A CONSUMING HERITAGE: BALTIMORE’S EASTERN EUROPEAN JEWISH IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY AND THEIR EVOLVING FOODWAYS, 1880-1939 by Charlotte Louise Sturm Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2013 Advisory Committee: Professor Lisa R. Mar, Chair Professor Marsha Rozenblit Professor Psyche Williams-Forson © Copyright by Charlotte Louise Sturm 2013 Acknowledgements I owe many debts of thanks to those who assisted me as I researched and wrote my thesis. Dr. Lisa Mar, my adviser, has been incredibly supportive, affirming, and wise in her guidance, scholarly and professional. I appreciate the time she shared with me to talk about my research and my career plans, as well as her efforts to review several drafts of my work. Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson graciously agreed to take me on as a student in the spring of 2012 for an independent study in foodways and history, despite the fact that I was not an American Studies student. I am grateful for her expertise and continued involvement in this project. Dr. Marsha Rozenblit joined my committee toward the end of the academic year, and her expertise in American Jewish history undoubtedly improved my thesis. My research experiences at the Maryland Historical Society, the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and the Special Collections of the University of Maryland, College Park were fruitful and enjoyable, thanks to the archivists who assisted me. Jennifer Vess, the archivist at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, always welcomed me, set aside her own work to help me find what I needed, and made my research days quite pleasant. My friends and family supported me with their love, humor, encouragement, and unflagging faith in my abilities to write this work. I look forward to sharing celebratory meals with each of them. My great-grandmother Katie, my grandma Frances, and my grandma Mary are still with me when I prepare their signature dishes. My mother Connie knows that I am still waiting for her to make lasagna for me. ii Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..……1 Chapter 1: New World, New Foods: Immigrant Engagements with American Foodways, 1880-1920………………………………………...13 Chapter 2: Charity and Social Reform, Americanization and Moral Uplift: Reconstructing Foodways in Baltimore, 1880-1920…………………….63 Chapter 3: Matzohs and Mitzvahs: Jewish Foodways in America and the Jewish Charities of Baltimore, 1880-1920…………………..…107 Chapter 4: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Recipes: Culinary Education and Personal Choice Among Baltimore’s Jewish Community, 1920-1939……………………………………...…140 Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………...184 Glossary………………………………………………………………………………...200 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………202 iii Introduction Addressing the members of the Politico-Literary Club, Austin McLanahan, a prominent Baltimore banker, remarked on the unsuitable nature of the immigrants who pervaded American society. He decried their ignorance of English, their unfamiliarity with American modes of living, and the persistence of their attachments to their native countries, encouraged by ethnic-national social, political, and religious groups. Likening the immigrants not to blemishes, which mar one’s face, McLanahan made a far more insidious comparison, calling the immigrants marks of disease which signaled the ruin of “our fair country.”1 In proposing solutions to this vast problem, McLanahan again employed medical language to make his point; to alleviate the old-fashioned and foreign habits and customs of the immigrants, they “must be treated and cured, made wholesome and blended into the background of our national life.”2 A medical cure, indicated in the loss of the immigrants’ original ethnic-national identity, would restore the nation to health. McLanahan summarized this section of his talk by asserting “in short we must stop gorging and digest; eat sparingly and carefully.”3 McLanahan concluded his presentation by stressing the importance of schooling as the vehicle through which the immigrant “could learn what America means.”4 Education would guide and instruct the immigrants in the ways of proper American living, rendering them capable of the responsibility of cultural citizenship in the nation. 1 Austin McLanahan, “Immigration,” May 8, 1924, p. 4, Politico-Literary Club Papers, Maryland Historical Society (hereafter cited as MdHS). 2 Ibid., 5. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 14. 1 McLanahan’s talk brought to the forefront a number of important concerns about assimilating Southern and Eastern European immigrants into American society, concerns which he shared with his fellow club members and Baltimore’s educated, affluent middle-class and elite citizens. These Americans worried that immigrants would ruin the country with their uncivilized ways, including their poor hygiene, their lack of refinement, their lazy attitude and unwillingness to work, and their strange foods and customs. Assimilating these aliens held out the only hope these Americans could see to save the nation, and education was the key method of sharing these lessons. But education was not to be accomplished solely in a formal classroom setting. Using a network of medical professionals and public health officials, friendly visitors and charity workers, social reformers and social settlement workers, and cooking instructors and home economics teachers, the American middle-class sought to remake the undesirable immigrants in their own image. Using food as one focal point for their assimilative instruction, these reformers were able to teach important lessons about nutrition, health, domesticity, and middle-class American values to their pupils. Using powerful imagery, Austin McLanahan evoked issues of health and concerns about disease in his lecture on immigration. His metaphors were quite familiar to his peers, as they were deeply tied to rhetoric about cultural citizenship and assimilation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 Americans feared that 5 Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) and George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican-American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) both discuss the health inspections conducted at immigration stations, a process which the government hoped would stop unhealthy and undesirable immigrants from entering the country and spreading their ill health among American citizens. Shah also discusses the linking of San Francisco Chinatown and its Chinese residents with tuberculosis and immorality, and the government’s attempts to protect the larger city’s public health from this neighborhood’s poor physical health and moral values. Sanchez describes the assimilative 2 immigrants were disease-ridden and would pollute the people of the nation with their poor health habits, and by extension would corrupt the moral values of their country with their sickened behavior. His solution to the immigrant problem, which relied on formal education as a primary means of assimilation, also constituted a popularly-held belief in this period; education, especially for immigrant children and children of immigrants, would instill American habits and values in the young students and interrupt the transmission of their ethnic-national heritage from their parents.6 McLanahan’s talk also employed food and the act of eating as a way of understanding assimilation. The image of gorging represented the massive tide of immigration which began during this period, swelling the American population. McLanahan’s choice of gorging was apt, for overeating was viewed as an unhealthy act which medical professionals in this period cautioned against. His call to digest the immigrants was closely entwined with the goals of assimilation, the blending or total incorporation of one’s previous ethnic-national identity into a new American one, as food is converted from its original state into nourishment and energy for the body. Eating sparingly alluded to the recent passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act

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