Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood
by iddo tavory
chicago, 224 pages, $27.50
In a clear plastic Ikea storage bin that my wife and I have been hauling across North America every time I take a new academic job, I recently found an old Christmas card. The card says “Merry Christmas from the Yellens and a Very Happy New Year!” Abe and Rose Yellen were my mom’s parents. The card shows cut-out, black and white photos of their heads superimposed on cartoony line drawings of their bodies. My grandparents are both encased in Christmas stockings. My uncle Barney is shown sitting up in a baby buggy. He was born in 1944, so I’m guessing the card is from 1945 or 1946. My mom, Sonya, who must have been about twelve at the time, is popping out of a present under a big Christmas tree.
Everyone in my family is Jewish.
Abe ran a silk-screen printing shop in Los Angeles. His parents, Isaac Yelowitz and Sophia Gluskoter, had come west from Chicago in the 1920s, when Abe was a teenager. Rose’s parents, Barnett Dorkin and Fannie Silberglitt, made the move to LA from Brooklyn around the same time.
They weren’t alone. Los Angeles was growing by leaps and bounds in the 1920s. Jews came in especially large numbers. Bruce Phillips of Hebrew Union College estimates that in the space of ten years, from 1920 to 1930, the Jewish population of LA swelled from 28,000 to more than 90,000, making the city the second largest center of American Jewry behind New York.
