East European Jewish Detroit in the Early Twentieth Century

Judaism, Summer, 2000 by Kenneth Waltzer

East European Jewish newcomers in Detroit were heavily oriented toward commerce and trade. This was a community, in some sense, differently structured, or less burdened by numbers, than the more heavily working-class East European Jewish community in New York that Irving Howe and Moses Rischin celebrated in World of Our Fathers and The Promised City. [19] It was also different from the East European Jewish community in Chicago, whose employment base was in garments and cigars as well as in commerce and peddling, that Irving Cutler describes in The Jews of Chicago. [20] Apparently, some of Detroit's earliest settling East European Jews initially sought to make their livings outside Detroit in the late nineteenth century, peddling in out-state regions of Michigan (Bay City, Saginaw, and Flint), in the lower and middle portions of the state (Jackson, Charlotte, Kalamazoo), and in nearby Ontario, Canada. Abba Keidan, for example, who came from Balberishok in Russian Poland (Lithuania) in the early 1880s after a pogrom in his village, took a pack and traveled around out-state Michigan as a peddler before he summoned his wife, Hanna Fredl, and their children to join him in Detroit. He then opened the Keidan Grocery at 600 Gratiot and sold goods to a predominantly Jewish clientele. [21] Harry Serling's parents came from Grodno in Russian Poland (Lithuania) and settled on Rivard in the 1890s; Harry, a second-generation immigrant, was a traveling salesman in Charlotte from 1907 to 1913, and then in Ontario from 1913 to 1914, before returning to the Hastings Street area and settling on Division between St. Antoine and Beaubien. There seems to have been an ingathering in Detroit and expansion of settlement during the early 1900s, corresponding with the unprecedented growth in the Motor City.

As Detroit developed and exploded with business and population, new opportunities presented themselves to enterprising immigrants for commerce and achievement inside the city. Detroit mushroomed in population, roughly doubling each decade, growing from 285,704 (1900) to 465,766 (1910) to 993,687 (1920). The city also expanded outward in territory and filled in with population. Other immigrant neighborhoods on the east side overflowed with newcomers who mostly worked in the auto factories, parts plants, and in outdoor construction as they built the physical city. They "formed colonies taking, like an invading army, section after section of the city," worried Raymond E. Cole of Detroit's elite Committee for Immigrants in America, and they continued to follow "many of the old foreign customs" and "traditions." [22] East European Jewish Detroit, in contrast, included growing numbers of clerks, traveling salesmen, peddlers, and street vendors, fewer workers overall, and almost no auto workers. Census figures that show, in 1910, that nearly half of all Jewish males in Detroit were in proprietary, managerial, and white-collar occupations compared with slightly more than a fifth of the general population. Nearly three-quarters of Jewish females who were employed held white-collar employment. [23] By 1920, about one third of Detroit Jews were proprietors and another 30 percent were clerks, salesmen, and peddlers. Only 29 percent were artisans and workers-and few of these were in labor unions. [24]