Art of a Jewish Woman (31 page)

Two other young women from St. Louis who were Felice’s age, Martha Gelhorn and Emily Hahn, both from mid-19
^th
Century German-Jewish immigrant families, found their calling as pioneering female journalists on a world stage. Gelhorn’s parents set her on her track--her physician father started medical clinics for the poor, her mother founded the St. Louis League of Women Voters. The family was among the founding members of the Ethical Society, a gathering of those who did not believe in a deity to gather weekly with their families in observance of and study of moral values. Martha Gellhorn became the first woman correspondent in the Spanish Civil War during which she met Ernest Hemingway and became his third wife from St. Louis.

Hemingway had grown up in Illinois, the son of a small-town physician, and after Martha left him he lamented, “I think if one is doomed to perpetually marry people from St. Louis, it is best to marry them from the best families.”
⁴³

Gellhorn went on to become a frontline correspondent during World War II; in her book Faces of War, she wrote, “Gradually I came to realize that people more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was honey, appetizing…The manipulated millions could be aroused or soothed by any lies…I belonged to a Federation of Cassandras, my colleagues the foreign correspondents whom I met at every disaster. They had been reporting the rise of fascism, its horrors and its sure menace, for years. If anyone listened to them, no one acted on their warnings. The doom they had long prophesied arrived on time, bit by bit, as scheduled. In the end we became solitary stretcher-bearers, trying to pull individuals free from the wreckage.”
⁴⁴

Felice came to St. Louis a refugee from fascism, whereas economic migration, the search for a better life, had propelled waves of immigration over two centuries to populate the city that became Felice’s home. The first migrants were the French and Creole merchants from Louisiana and Europe at the end of the 18
^th
Century; then white planters from the deep south came north with their slaves and planted cotton in Missouri’s Bootheel while family members moved to the city. When Missouri became a state in 1820, settlers from Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and further north and east flowed to the city and state, slowly changing the economy from slave dependent agriculture to an industrial and merchant one. The city was the embarkation point for the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails; the crossroads of freight and passenger north-south river travel, its port the country’s second busiest one in 1850 after New York; and the terminus of the eastern railroads.

After the Civil War, many freed black people came north, joined in the second half of the 19
^th
Century by large numbers of German, Irish, Greek, Italian, and Polish arrivals. During this period two waves of Jewish immigration occurred--German Jews first and then Eastern European Jews from Poland and Russia toward the end of the century and in the first decade of the 20
^th
Century. Those from Germany generally came from cities, were well educated, may have had some financial capital, and were looking for new opportunities. Those from Eastern Europe were escaping abject rural poverty and anti-Semitic killing pogroms. They usually had little or no education and were far more religiously observant than their counterparts from Germany. They worked for hourly wages--often for the well established, cultural assimilation-minded German Jews who tended to disdain what they saw as the newcomers’ primitive ghetto-mindedness. When the newcomers had some savings they tended to open small shops and support their children with education into the professions, as Edward’s parents did. During the Great Migration of African-Americans between 1910-1930, tens of thousand of blacks came from the south for jobs, making them approximately twelve percent of the population of St. Louis in the1930s. In the 1940s there was a second black migration as defense and heavy industries opened jobs to black people that had been denied them before.

The story of Dred Scott, the slave who sued to be recognized a free man in the old St. Louis riverfront courthouse in 1845, is pivotal in understanding how the city--and society in general--thought about race. Dred Scott literally sued for his right to be recognized as a man, as a person with standing in the legal system. Missouri had been admitted to the union in 1821 as a slave state under the terms of the Missouri Compromise. It was a bargain between the southern states, who feared a future without slave labor and resented federal interference, and northerners’ desire to abolish slavery. The compromise asserted that Missouri would be admitted a slave state, Maine a free state, and all future territories and states north of Missouri’s border with Arkansas would be free states.

Dred Scott’s master had brought him to Missouri from Virginia, then sold him to a U.S. Army doctor in St. Louis. The doctor took Scott as his personal assistant to Illinois (a free state) and Wisconsin Territory (free), then back to Missouri. After the doctor passed away, Scott offered to pay the doctor’s widow for his freedom, but she refused. Scott filed suit, and his lawyer argued that his time in Illinois and Wisconsin made him a free man.

A Missouri court first ruled for Scott, then a Missouri appeals court ruled against him. In 1857 the United States Supreme Court finally ruled 7-2 that Dred Scott was still a slave because in the court’s opinion a Negro was not entitled to the rights of a United States citizen. The Supreme Court stated, “Negroes have no rights which any white man was bound to respect.” The court’s opinion concluded that slaves are property and the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects against the seizure of private property. The Chief Justice, a Delaware tobacco grower and slave owner until he freed his slaves before assuming his post, professed that slavery was evil but felt it was a problem to be solved gradually by the slave states themselves. The dissenting opinion protested the majority position saying that if Dred Scott had no rights in court, the Supreme Court had no right hearing the case.

The majority hoped that their decision would end the growing anti-slavery agitation. Instead it fueled abolitionist sentiment in the North, which heightened the antagonisms that ignited the Civil War. During the war, four out of five Missouri men who enlisted joined the Union army, but Confederate sentiment was strong and the Union kept one of its largest garrisons close to St. Louis at Jefferson Barracks to suppress any Confederate uprising.

Ironically, no action was ever taken against Dred Scott in St. Louis and he remained de facto free. But St. Louis was almost as completely segregated as any southern city when Felice arrived. There were separate neighborhoods and a demarcation line ran along Delmar Boulevard from the river west to the city limit. The north side was predominantly black, the south white. Schools were separate; drinking fountains were separate; there was a city hospital for blacks and one for whites; hospital wards at the Washington University School of Medicine were segregated; and neither of the city’s two major universities admitted blacks until after World War II. Swimming pools were separate except for Friday afternoons and evenings when blacks could swim at the otherwise segregated YMCA because the pool’s water was changed after closing that night. The eminent private elementary and high schools did not admit black students. Only the public transportation was racially mixed.

Also in the spirit of discrimination, the private schools had small quotas for Jewish students. Country clubs were separated along religious lines--Protestant, Jewish, Catholic. The elite German-Jewish country club disdained to admit Jews of Eastern European origin as lower class. Further, the assimilated German-Jewish community was profoundly ambivalent about supporting the Zionist struggle for a Jewish nation in Palestine. At the same time a cadre of Jews of Polish-Russian origin was stealing arms from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, the U.S. Army World War II Midwestern training post, and smuggling them overseas to Palestine.

In spite of the separated societies and races when Felice arrived, there was a largely tranquil co-existence between them. This did not exist in Palestine, Germany, Poland and Russia; nor in the Deep South where a black man could lose his life if he crossed a racial boundary. The penalty was not so severe in relatively genteel, forgiving St. Louis.

However, segregation was so complete that it was easy for people to be completely unaware of the lives of the others, except when they crossed in business or in the course of blacks coming to white homes as domestic workers. It was easy for whites to imagine that segregation brought no harm to blacks because they were not inside their skin and couldn’t feel the daily damage to self-confidence, the diminution of ambition, and the nauseating anger that came from being treated as less worthy, less a person than a white.

Felice arrived by train at Union Station downtown on Market Street. It was cavernous and clanging, the largest railway station in the world when it was inaugurated in 1896, filling a whole block. It looked like a Rhine castle with gothic towers, peaked roofs, and crenellated turrets like battlements. Its granite and limestone was covered with work-a-day pollution from nearby train switching yards, steel mills, stock yards, tanneries, breweries, and trains hauling to and fro at the grain mills. Just east from the station toward the river the view was dense with tall office buildings, company headquarters, and massive department stores and government buildings.

Across from Union Station were decaying tenements and small cheap hotels with garish neon signs. Rows of streets of three and four story apartment buildings stretched west. The Great Depression that had idled a third of white workers and 80% of black workers was receding, and in two years the tenements across from the station were gone. They were replaced with a plaza and block long fountain of bronze nudes playing among plumes of water. Named the Meeting of the Waters, the fountain symbolized the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, civic renewal and new optimism.

Selected References

Baltic Capitals,
ed. by Neil Taylor, et al. Bucks, England: Bradt, 2003.

Betsey Brown,
Ntozake Shange. New York: Picador, 1985, (a story of St. Louis, Mo.).

Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour,
Barbara Tuchman. New York: New York University Press, 1956.

City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa,
Adam Lebor. London: Blomsbury Publishing, 2006.

Clement Greenberg: A Life in Art,
Florence Rubenfeld. New York: Scribner, 1997.

Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948,
Zachary Lockman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume 2, 1795-Present,
Norman Davies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Guides Bleus: Mediterranee Orientale.
Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1953.

Guides Bleus: Vosges--Lorraine, Alsace.
Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1928.

History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time,
Howard M. Sachar. New York: Knopf, 1997.

The Jewish Community of Vilnius,
Simon Alperovitch and Israel Lempert. Vilnius: American Joint distribution Committee, 2001.

Lives Remembered: A Shtetl Through a Photographer’s Eye,
photographs by Zalman Kaplan, edited by Louis Levine, essays by Jonathan Rosen and Jeffrey Shandler. New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2002.

Literary St. Louis: A Guide,
Lorin Cuoco and William H. Gass, editors. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2000.

Musu Vilne (Our Vilne),
Israelis Lempertas. Vilnius: Jewish Community of Lithuania, 2003.

Szcuczyn Yizkor Book: The Destruction of the Community of Sczuczyn.
Tel Aviv: Published by former residents of Szczuczyn in Israel, 1954. Also:
http://Szczuczyn.com/yizkorbook.htm
, translated by Alan Stone, edited by Jose Gutstein.

Szczuczyn, Poland, website:
http://Szcuczyn.com/yizkorbook.htm
, translated by Alan Stone, edited by Jose Gutstein. Includes excerpts from the
Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, Poland,
by D. Dombrovska, Abraham Wein and Aharon Vais, “Szczuczyn,” Vol 4, p. 445-448. Translated from Hebrew by Zvi Gitelman, ed. by Jose Gutstein. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1975-1999.

Terror Out of Zion: The Violent and Deadly Shock Troops of Israeli Independence, 1929-1949,
J. Bowyer Bell. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977.

Vilnius,
Thomas Venelove. Vilnius: Paknys, 2004.

Zion in the Valley: The Jewish Community in St Louis, Vol 2, The Twentieth Century,
Walter Ehlich: Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Endnotes

¹
One Palestine: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate,
Tom Segev. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. p. 399.

²
Ibid, p. 422.

³
Ibid, pp. 422-443.

⁴
Ibid, p. 128.

⁵
Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948,
Mark Levine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, p. 138.

⁶
Ibid, pp. 121-128.

⁷
Gabriel Peri article in
L’Humanite,
trans. Henry Massie.

⁸
Miloscz’ ABC’s,
Ceszlaw Milosz, trans. S. Madeline Levine. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001, pp. 3-5.