The Human Touch

WHEN I read, several months ago, that German Jewish refugees who fled to Poland chose to return to Germany as to a far lesser evil, I was not surprised. Without meaning to Gilbert and Sullivanize the situation, a refugee’s lot is not a happy one, not even in that once gay Paree where your exile haunts the offices of relief agencies or lives in makeshift barracks somewhat better than the corrugated tin shacks of our own Hoovervilles. But when, the other day, I learned that a German Jew who had come here after several months in a concentration camp, had already begun hankering to return, not to a concentration camp, but to Germany, the case struck me as one of misplaced nostalgia.

Misplaced, perhaps, but not unusual. I have heard that as many as thirty years ago, when the great stream of immigration from pogrom-ridden Russia was at its height, there were Jews who had fled gratefully enough and came to America and remained only to wish that they could return to the land from which they had fled. Every effort barely short of physical restraint had to be employed to prevent some of these discontented immigrants from returning to the land of the Czar.

HE WAS SOMEBODY THERE

One of these, who came at the beginning of the century, told me of his feelings. In the Old Country he was a village teacher, and compared to his fellow-villagers, a personage. He was somebody. He worked chiefly with his brains. He was not one of an undifferentiated mass. He had almost as many hours of leisure as of work. He was not living in a perfect Elysium, perhaps, because, if he were, he would never have left the land. And perhaps New York brought out into relief the pleasures, unrealized at the time, which living in Russia gave him.

For in New York he was a common workman, a number, more or less, in a sweatshop. He worked hard all day and left the shop at night, exhausted. He was lost in the crowd. No one knew him and he knew nobody. Although he was in better circumstances compared to those he had “enjoyed” in Russia, they were not better than those of his mental inferiors in the New World. Other qualities seemed to have value in the New World, qualities other than those which had won for him his little niche in the Old World. Again and again this immigrant youth asked himself: “Was it for this kind of life that I came; why did I come at all?” but he stayed on and, after a fashion, conquered the New World. He does not see himself belonging to any other world. But the struggle was hard and he understands the state of mind, the state of feeling, of the German-Jew who wishes he were back in Germany.

For how long, I asked, must a man live in a new country before he stops pining to return to the Old Country?

Which produced the story, out of my informant’s recollection, of a man who had returned to his homeplace even before this younger man of whom I write had set out for America. This older person had been employed as a saddle maker before he sailed for the United States. Here he learned to become a knee pants operator. He remained in this country for nine or ten years and then returned. He had saved a few hundred dollars over this dreary period.

HE GAVE UP

He could not abide New York any longer; he preferred to take his chance in Russia. But his example did not deter the scores of his fellow-villagers who had been persuaded that the New World was still “die goldene Medina.” Most of the immigrants had to find out themselves that it was not, and perhaps a few found that it was.

A more recent case of transplantation has come to my ears. A New York Jew with a wife and two children took his family to Palestine. After spending a year or more there, he brought his family back to New York, not in discontent, but in decision, so to speak. He returned to New York with the decision that he must take with him to Palestine much more money the second time he goes forth than he did the first. He knows that Palestine is desirable, and his taste of it has whetted his desire to return-but under a more satisfactory economic classification. And when he has raised the sum he has fixed as necessary you won’t be able to see him and his brood for the dust their going will raise. And perhaps, by that time, the brood will be somewhat larger.