Central and (South) Eastern Europeans dedicate a fair amount of their spare time to what most contemporary Americans may consider quite trivial. We are slaves to our appearance outside the home, at our jobs, at the restaurants and the cafes we visit regularly, in the crowded stations of the metro, in the public buses, in the taxicabs, at the stadiums, in the parks, at the tennis courts, and especially at the schools and universities we attend. “Come as you are” refers only to one’s financial condition, never to one’s physical attire. However superfluous it may all seem to an outsider, “dressing up” is a defining force of our cultural identity.
When tourists visit these semi-exotic cultural remnants in the old countries, they are exposed to a world that seems to stem and re-root its existence in the home. They are fascinated by the fact the home is more than a haven to the Eastern European; it is an extension of his life. And somewhere in between the realization and the fascination with this understanding, the average tourist notices the native’s attire. It is worn by time, yet clean and crisply pressed. It may even smell of the hand soap that the tourist used in the morning in his hotel room. Yet when the tourist and the native leave the premises of the home, a transformation takes place. The native is transformed into a mannequin, beautifully new and shiny clothes adorn his body. Every time they go outside the home, the host is transformed by new clothes, an ensemble best befitting of all of the different themes for the outings: coffee in the afternoon, a dinner and a movie, a night at the ballet, a casual afternoon stroll by the river bank, a game of tennis in the park; each time, the host’s appearance is changed as he puts on a new suit, a new pair of pants, a new blazer, a new pullover, at least one of the accessories is replaced and the rest of the “new garments” shift the order of their appearance on the host’s body. It is almost like an unstoppable game of hide and seek, without anyone being found out from their hiding place. And even more fascinating is that both men and women in Eastern European societies are great at this game.
What would then be an outsider’s estimate of the identity of the Central and (South) Eastern European cultures and their participants? Will they view the average Eastern European as a “man” of trivial property, someone whose way of life and perspective on the world largely consists of how he or she appears in the eyes of the immediate surroundings? Will they find this charade to be a little bit precious?
I cannot claim to have an answer to these semi-rhetorical questions. I can only attempt at juxtaposing my insight of contemporary Eastern European culture(s) with Andrew R. Heinze’s enlightening study of the eastern European Jewish immigrant life in New York City between 1880 and 1914 and its striking influence on the role of consumption in the process of cultural assimilation.
The book’s title, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity , discloses Heinze’s estimated goals in carrying out his evocative analysis of perhaps the most important moments in the lives of the urban Jewish immigrants. However, the focal point of Heinze’s examination, the relationship between the acculturation of eastern European Jewish immigrants and the rise of the role of mass consumption within American society in general, does not hinder the analysis’s pervasive scope. What makes it accessible to other people and other cultures is the methodology that the author relies on, while weaving his tale of consumption as a bridge between cultures.
Heinze, the student of immigrant life in all of its color, dedicates the last part of his book to the various sources behind his research. To a student of both American culture and academic research techniques, I was very much taken by the way he chooses to include the extensive list of resources that have helped him, that have inspired him, to continue with his research in the field. The bibliographical essay can be easily read as any expository essay, giving the future researcher a starting point, and certainly providing the common reader with more than just a survey of articles, budget studies, autobiographical texts, advertising campaigns, theoretical works on historical and sociological issues, examples of useful marketing techniques. By sharing with the readers his personal attachment to these invaluable sources, Heinze brings us closer to what at first may seem to be quite an impersonal study of very personal choices.
The book is tentatively divided into five parts, each one subdivided into a number of chapters, whose ending paragraphs provide the reader with the subject matter of the following chapter. There is a fitting introduction and a conclusive summary of the work’s goals in the epilogue. Nonetheless, one may pick out a chapter of the book and read it in isolation, as a separate article on a particular aspect of consumption by eastern European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century, in American society. If read in this way, the reader will find out, for example, only about the relationship between the most prominent holidays in the Jewish calendar (Sukkot, Chanukah, and Passover) and the role of the eastern European Jewish immigrant as a prominent consumer within American society, acclimating himself and his family to the American standard of living. Or as Heinze concludes on page 71, “But among the multitude of American Jews, the popularity of Chanukah had little to do with ideology. It stemmed instead from the powerful presence of Christmas as the American right of consumption” and its proximity in the calendar. Thus, the reader will miss out on a wonderful opportunity to witness the (re)shaping and (re)structuring of a cultural identity that has previously considered itself to be the superior to all other ethnic groups and nations in the world.
There are, however, parts, passages in Heinze’s narrative that are not as tightly connected to his concept of the eastern European Jewish immigrant and his role as a consumer in the period between the 1880s and the 1910s, mostly because in them the author’s generalizations are not as relevant to the analysis’s main focus, and are greatly “buffed”.
In the chapter titled “The Immigrant as a Consumer”, Heinze attempts to summarize the differences between the various groups of immigrants from central and eastern Europe who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He examines the data behind a comprehensive study of industrial workers of immigrant heritage in the United States conducted at the time by the British Board of Trade. The study’s findings lead Heinze to build further on his argument relating the difference between the eastern European Jewish immigrants and those who immigrated from the regions of central and eastern Europe at the same time and were of “gentile” origin, the former claiming the role of consumer over laborer, thus undergoing a smoother integration within American mainstream culture, whereas the latter who chose not to play the role of consumer to such an extent, acculturated with greater difficulty. This analysis is more than accurate and continues to be a valuable point in the examination of eastern European immigrant experience at the turn of twentieth century. However, Heinze does not stop there; he continues to explicate the reasons for the eastern European Jewish immigration to the Promised Land. On page 35, he says: “Estranged from the land, the Jews of eastern Europe endured material conditions that differed somewhat from those of the surrounding peasantry. Working primarily as artisans and merchants, Jews had much greater familiarity with urban refinements, and their autonomous, communal institutions helped the poorest among them to enjoy the special foods of the Sabbath and holidays.” (Italics added)
Using a very powerful past participle, Heinze, purposefully or not, makes a very inaccurate claim. The eastern European Jews were not estranged from the land due to a lawfully supported decision in the countries of the Pale of Settlement, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Their very own remarkably uniform culture had always discouraged them from working the land; they could and were encouraged to own land, but they ought to have employed others to cultivate it. This particular segment of the eastern European Jewish culture and the positions that prominent urban Jews held in the social milieu (as infamous money-lenders), at the same time obediently working for a totalitarian regime (a bowed head is not cut by the saber), were the true reasons for the rising sense of anti-Semitic sentiments of the non-Jewish peasantry that could not even afford the little luxuries that Jews were able to enjoy during the observance of the main holidays.
I do not presume to disavow the undeniable historical fact of the increasing rise of anti-Semitic political persecution following the assassination of the Russian Tzar Alexander II at the end of the nineteenth century; I simply want to point out to an oversight in Heinze’s otherwise solid analysis of the eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States and its impact on the habit of mass consumption. His lucid portrayal of the gradual “greening out” that American Jews experienced (since to eastern European Jews America was not a means to an end but an end in itself) through a specific force of acculturation – consumption – remains a remarkable study of one immigrant’s pursuit for the American Dream (the clothes, the photographs, the new furniture, the Sabbath shopping, the rise of the importance of the white-collar worker, the parlor, the piano, the day trips to Cony Island, the mandatory summer vacations in the Catskills, the garment and retail industries, the ownership of major publications, the influence on the rise of marketing as a commercial enterprise, the development of the motion picture entertainment industry).
This notion of narrowing the gap between two distinct cultures, one already set in its ways, the other an immigrant one, through the power of mass consumption is a living, breathing, everyday practice of present-day societies that may already seem to be set in their ways. If for example, we examine contemporary eastern European societies, we come across firmly rounded cultures where one’s notion of physical appearance has to meet certain criteria. An Eastern European man, woman and child need to rise to the occasion, letting the people in their surroundings know that they are of a certain social standing, of a certain age, of a certain profession, of a certain income, with a certain intent. But this “flexible form of silent communication” provides the eastern European consumer with freedom from the self-assertion of a rigid social, cultural, religious status. (90) Through the accessibility of internationally recognized brands of clothes (Gap, Benetton, Phard, Nike, Levis, Diesel, New Balance, Lacosta, Sergio Tanchini, Mango, Bershka), Eastern Europeans can communicate a different social, cultural, religious status than the one they are bound to by heritage and income, at the same time remaining “true” to their cultural identity of “being presentable in public”. In this respect the contemporary Eastern European resembles the eastern European Jewish immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century, striving to pass as a respectable member of American mainstream society.
Most contemporary critics of Central and (South) Eastern European societies will largely disagree with this juxtaposition, claiming the unique nature and development of these European societies that have always advocated the power of the hand-made, hand-sold, hand-crafted cultural products over mass produced goods (foods, furniture, house appliances, garments). And they wouldn’t be entirely off key. However, the rise of super-market shopping has brought down the once popular store around the corner; people no longer have the time nor the money to hire a private carpenter to do their furnishing, or to build a house themselves, one which they cannot afford to own, so they rent spacious apartments in urban neighborhoods; almost all households have an almost reliable washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher; and unless the individual has the time and the energy to have custom-made clothes and shoes specially made, or have someone in the immediate family circle who has the time and the skills to do it for them, most people shop at major department stores or shops that carry popular and accessible brands. Therefore, whether we want to admit it or not, the products of mass consumption are unwittingly “liberating” the spirit of the contemporary eastern European, whose acculturation is not the result of a geographical displacement, but of a fictitious social transgression and cultural mimicry.
Subscribe