There was quite an active Jewish Mafia in Minneapolis, which reached its zenith during Prohibition, led by the notorious Isadore Blumenfeld, better known as “Kid Cann.” My dad, who was not in this Mafia but grew up with many of these characters, would occasionally tell me stories about them. Indeed, one of my earliest childhood memories was my dad telling me about a friend of his who had been sentenced to a jail term. This was quite a shock to a young boy. I couldn’t imagine my father knowing anyone who actually went to jail. So I asked my dad: Why? And in one of the greatest euphemisms I ever heard—so good it stuck with me all these years—my dad told me that his friend was sentenced to jail because “he was shopping in a store before it was open.”
Breaking and entering has never been described so benignly.
The largest minority groups, Jews and blacks, settled in North Minneapolis “because it was one of the few areas that would rent to them when more blatant discrimination abounded in housing practices,” noted the June 2, 2013, essay “A Brief History of Jews and African Americans in North Minneapolis,” by Rachel Quednau on The-City-Space.com:
Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe moved into the Northside during a general period of immigration—the early 1900s. They built a Hebrew school in 1910—Talmud Torah—which is still well known today. At that time, it offered social services in addition to education at a nearby community center. Jewish businesses also cropped up in the area. Meanwhile, African Americans made their homes throughout North Minneapolis before this time, but they appeared in larger numbers after World War II …
Both Jews and African Americans provided a significant portion of residents in a North Minneapolis public housing project, Sumner Field Homes, which was built during the New Deal. These projects were racially segregated, but interviews with past residents [and this was very much the story my parents told me] … suggest that children from different backgrounds played together and other mingling occurred.
The biggest social problem for my grandparents’ and parents’ generations in Minneapolis was not relations with blacks but with anti-Semitic whites. An essay on the St. Louis Park Historical Society website, written by Jeanne Andersen, quoted an article entitled “Minneapolis: The Curious Twin,” by Carey McWilliams, that was published in Common Ground magazine in September 1946. McWilliams proclaimed: “Minneapolis is the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States. In almost every walk of life, ‘an iron curtain’ separates Jews from non-Jews in Minneapolis.” The article went on to say that “although only 4 percent of the population, Jews were publicly and unapologetically excluded from membership in private country clubs and also Rotary, Lions, and Kiwanis Clubs and groups like the Toastmasters. Jews were even barred from the Minneapolis chapter of the American Automobile Club.” I remember growing up being told by my parents that there was a time they could not join Triple-A. “In 1948,” McWilliams wrote, “frustrated Jewish doctors started their own hospital, Mt. Sinai, after being denied access to Minneapolis medical facilities.” I was born there. The article also noted that Jews were blocked from joining local chapters of labor unions that had been started in New York by Jewish organizers and that “summer resorts on Lake Minnetonka advertised that they catered to ‘Gentiles only.’ Department stores such as Montgomery Ward refused to interview Jewish job applicants. Many neighborhoods were ‘restricted,’ barring Jews, Blacks, and even Catholics and Italians. Jewish teachers were few and far between.” The discrimination was “much more pronounced in Minneapolis than in St. Paul,” according to McWilliams.
So, with the first chance to get out, after World War II, the Jews left the Northside urban core of Minneapolis en masse for St. Louis Park. As Quednau put it, “Many of them had ascended in class and wealth since they or their parents immigrated to America, and this allowed them more control over their housing along with more opportunity to be treated fairly in the housing market.”
It wasn’t quite that easy, though, to just move to any suburb. Many of the western suburbs adjacent to Minneapolis were not platted for many starter homes, or had large agricultural tracts or had a legacy of refusing to sell homes to blacks or “Hebrews.” St. Louis Park, though, had been platted for small forty-foot lots since the early part of the twentieth century, explained Jeanne Andersen of the Historical Society. “For some reason, the community’s early developers and factory owners always had a growth mind-set,” she told me. So there was a lot of available housing stock and the real estate developers “were perfectly happy to sell it to Jews,” in contrast to other suburbs at the time, such as Golden Valley or Edina. Speaking of the suburbs that grew up around Minneapolis after World War II, Andersen remarked, “Besides St. Louis Park, I didn’t find anyone else holding out the welcome mat for Minneapolis’s unwanted Jews.”
My parents and virtually all my Jewish friends’ parents were part of that great 1950s exodus. When I was three, in 1956, my parents packed up our Buick and joined the migration of Jews westward—from North Minneapolis to St. Louis Park, seven miles away. We lived in an aluminum-sided, three-bedroom rambler—I had two older sisters, Shelley and Jane—and like everyone else on West Twenty-Third Street, we all went to the local public elementary school, junior high, and high school with nearly the same classmates for all twelve years. Our house cost my parents the grand sum of $14,500.
It’s hard to believe that this little town that looked just like all the towns around it and was not separated from them by a wall or moat could develop such a unique liberal culture of its own, but it did. “From the very beginning, Park has had a welcoming attitude” toward strangers, oddballs, bars and bartenders, observed Andersen. Where other suburbs resisted bars, and gas stations, said Andersen, “Park just couldn’t say ‘no.’ An unfortunate proclivity for dirty industry was part of this ‘progressive’ attitude, bringing us plants that processed lead, lithium, concrete, and, of course, creosote, but those industries also provided jobs.”
My family and faith community formed the first ring of the many concentric, reinforcing communities in which I grew up. My dad’s brother lived in an apartment house 250 yards away from our home; my mom’s sister and brother-in-law three doors away. We celebrated every Jewish and non-Jewish holiday together with our extended family, with our moms taking turns as to who made the matzoh balls and popovers on Passover and the turkey on Thanksgiving.
I am keenly aware that my generation was a transition generation between the era of my parents—who always felt that life was a suitcase with a false bottom, so you should never get too comfortable—and my daughters’ generation, for whom anti-Semitism is something they largely learned about through history books. Most of our grandparents were immigrants from various European pogroms, and our parents were born into the Depression and then World War II. So even though we had found our own little goldene medina in St. Louis Park, they were always wary. Our parents and grandparents were a generation of Jews who were at home in America and Minnesota—but tensely at home. They were always concerned that things were too good to be true. They had seen the Holocaust; they had touched the bottom of the Depression. They knew demons always lurked below. The acceptance of Jews and the existence of Israel seemed a startling departure to them—not a feature of nature.
It came out in little ways and phrases that often stuck in the mind of my generation. My childhood friend Howard Carp used to say of his Minnesota Jewish grandmother: “A chicken to my grandmother was like a Buffalo to the Sioux—no part was left unused: the neck, the butt. We used to say: ‘Grandma, what are we eatin’ here?’” Howard’s grandmother never knew when she would be able to afford the next one, so she knew she’d better use all of this one.
For most of my years growing up, the established golf clubs in the Minneapolis area did not accept Jews. We had our own Jewish golf club, Brookview, and it was another community within the Jewish community—the members put on theatrical plays that they wrote each summer; they had regular summer Sunday dinners and bingo games, a swim team, family talent contests
, and a poker club where all the winnings each week went into a pot, and when it got big enough the husbands all took their wives on a trip to Acapulco. Brookview was a real anchor in our lives. During the winter, the golf club organized a bowling league every Sunday morning, with each player betting with the other using a bowling handicap system. As a young boy I always accompanied my father to the bowling alley on Sundays to watch and root for my dad. To borrow the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s image, in those days there was no one in my St. Louis Park community “bowling alone.”
I grew up caddying at Brookview for my dad and his friends and learning to play golf from the age of five. Some of my best friends today are still the guys I played with and caddied with back then. And because most of these men I caddied for owned small businesses, I was exposed, through their golf-course patter, to the world of business, and from that developed a respect for entrepreneurs and risk takers. I would overhear them talking about their deals, their successes, hot stocks, and, yes, losses. The first time I was exposed to the concept of bankruptcy was on the golf course. There was a guy at our club who my dad informed me one day had to drop out because he went “bankrupt.” I did not know exactly what that meant, but I could see that he was out of money and out of golf balls and out of the club and it was not something I wanted to ever happen to my dad. Caddying teaches you many things, but most of all it offers an insight into character. We caddies all knew who cheated. We all knew who had integrity. We all knew who blamed their caddy for a bad shot. And most of all, we knew, as the great amateur player Jimmy Dunne observed in the September 8, 2011, Golf Digest, that at the food shack between nines “there were some guys who would let you get a soda. There were some guys who let you get a soda and a hot dog. And there was the rare guy who would let you get a soda and a hamburger. And you knew who those guys were. You knew.”
My dad and I used to play golf in the summer after he got home from work—six or seven holes after dinner and before the sun went down. To get to the club we had to drive through the intersection of Louisiana Avenue and Highway 12. Every so often we would go past it and my dad would remind me that during the Great Depression he worked at a CCC—Civilian Conservation Corps—camp near there when he was a teenager. The CCC was the public works relief program established by the Roosevelt administration from 1933 to 1942 to provide employment for young, unmarried men, who built public buildings and parks. More than once my dad told me he made one dollar a day working there, most of which he saved for his family, and that he could only afford to buy a loaf of bread to eat—“and I can still feel it stuck in my throat,” he would say. Every so often, when we would pass that intersection, I would say, as only a smart-ass teenager could, “I know, I know, you can still feel that loaf of bread stuck in your throat.” He never forgot it, but neither did I. Fortunately my daughters will never know such a feeling.
Brookview eventually relocated and built a new course in Hamel, a more westerly suburb, and my dad died there from a heart attack on the par-four fifteenth hole, when I was nineteen. He lied three. After he passed away in 1973, I was walking down the fairway at Oakridge Country Club, where the older Jewish money belonged, playing with a friend of my father’s. It was a beautiful summer day and the course was in magnificent condition—bright green grass and flowers everywhere—when out of the blue this family friend put his arm around my shoulder and whispered, “Tommy, if the goyim [Gentiles] knew we had something this nice, they would take it away from us.”
Since I experienced childish versions of anti-Semitism in my high school—kids throwing pennies at the Jews because they were supposedly so cheap they would pick them up—I was not innocent about such matters, but his remark jarred me. That was the abiding ethic of my parents’ generation of Jews—things were always too good to be true.
If the Jewish community of St. Louis Park had a beating heart, a holy of holies, it was not a synagogue or the Jewish Community Center. It was the Lincoln Delicatessen, mostly just known as “the Del,” and the competitor to my aunt and uncle’s Boulevard Del. My mom worked at the Lincoln Del as a bookkeeper to put my sister Jane through Bryn Mawr College, and as a little boy I used to play on the baker’s wooden tables, sometimes braiding challahs. The Lincoln Del was owned by my parents’ dear friends Morrie and Tess Berenberg. Morrie held court there at a table in the dining room every afternoon and evening, entertaining customers while keeping an eye on the deli counter.
Berenberg’s granddaughter Wendi Zelkin Rosenstein and Kit Naylor, who have been drafting a history entitled Memories and Recipes from the Lincoln Del, observed in their book proposal that “for Jewish and non-Jewish customers alike, it was the Minneapolis version of ‘Cheers,’ except that at the Del everybody really did know your name.” What made the Del so beloved, added Rosenstein, “was that it was the true center of life for the Minneapolis Jewish community—it was the place for everyone to meet after school or before a movie, to tailgate before a bus ride to a sports event, to get engaged, or to celebrate life after a funeral. From graduations to business meetings, the Lincoln Del remains a touchstone for people who grew up in Minneapolis and St. Louis Park.” The Del was also a vitally important mixing spot for the whole St. Louis Park community, a place where non-Jews got comfortable eating Jewish food and experiencing Jewish culture. People drove from all over the region to buy the Del’s bagels.
I will confess here—for the first time—that when I was working for the competing Boulevard Del, I would drive down to the Lincoln Del bakery in our truck every day to pick up the bagels, which the Boulevard bought wholesale from the Lincoln. Occasionally, temptation got the better of me; the smell of those warm bagels wafting forward from the back of that truck became too great to resist. So more than once I could not help stealing a plain bagel from the back of the truck and wolfing it down while it was still warm. I can still taste that to this day.
When my dad died suddenly, my widowed mom couldn’t afford my college tuition, so Morrie and his friend Jake Garber, my dad’s boss, and my aunt and uncle, all pitched in. Morrie was the driving force behind it all, though. I did not come to him for help. He just came to me one day and said, “You can’t afford this,” and that he would make it happen. It was a powerful lesson in community for me: When you are in a real one, never, ever say to someone in need: “Call me if you need help.” If you want to help someone, just do it.
Our Hebrew school was serious, even if we weren’t. From third through seventh grade, Monday through Thursday, we walked out the door of our public elementary schools at around 3:00 p.m. and got directly onto the Hebrew school bus, which drove us to the St. Louis Park Talmud Torah. There, we got chocolate chip cookies and chocolate milk and had ninety minutes of Hebrew classes on four weekdays, plus Sunday mornings. That was the after-school program for my generation until we were thirteen and had our bar and bat mitzvahs. Virtually every Jewish kid I knew growing up went through the local Hebrew school. Its vitality ended up attracting even more Jews from North Minneapolis.
As a result, by the 1960s, roughly 20 percent of St. Louis Park’s residents, and public school population, was Jewish. As Al Franken told The New Yorker on July 20, 2009: “Not exactly a shtetl, but by Minnesota standards, a lot of Jews.”
St. Jewish Park
And thus began a great accidental mini-experiment in American pluralism.
It was as if America’s Founding Fathers reconvened and said, “Let’s have some fun. Let’s test just how well we can make ‘out of many—one’: Let’s mix dark-haired third-generation Jews, newly liberated from the inner city and energized by the postwar era—named Goldberg, Coen, and Friedman—with blond Protestant and Catholic Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and German-descended Americans, named Swenson, Anderson, and Bjornson, and do it almost overnight in one very small town in Minnesota, and see what happens!” It was no wonder people started calling it “St. Jewish Park.” The Coen brothers captured this cultural clash and synthesis well in A Serious Man, when in the
synagogue bar mitzvah scene an elderly man is asked to lift the Torah scrolls, a tradition in every Jewish service, but the load is too heavy for him. As he starts losing control of the Torah scrolls, he exclaims, “Jesus Christ!”
Building pluralism, making one out of many, a great American tradition, does not happen automatically or easily. Real pluralism never comes easy, because it has to be built not just on tolerance of the other but also on respect of the other, trust of the other. Like all such cultural encounters that have happened around America over the centuries, there was a fascination with and rejection of the “other,” attraction and repulsion, beautiful moments of understanding and painful moments of misunderstanding; there were crushes and breakups, intermarriages, divorces and remarriages. In any given week, I saw biases melt away and biases displayed. We dated each other, slighted each other, tolerated each other, quietly mocked each other and embraced each other—all at the same time. We worked on yearbooks and newspapers and sports teams and student councils together, and although we prayed at different buildings to different gods on different days in different ways, somehow through trial and error, we built a community—but not without some broken emotional bones along the way.
According to the St. Louis Park Historical Society, “As usual, the High School Prom of the St. Louis Park Class of 1949 was to be held at the Automobile Club in Bloomington. A manager there found out that a Jewish student planned to attend, and banned him. St. Louis Park School Superintendent Harold Enestvedt personally told the Club that if all of his students were not welcome, the Prom would be held somewhere else. The Club reversed itself and everyone went to Prom as scheduled.”
Thank You for Being Late Page 44