A Shtetl Childhood Right Here in the USA

I have always believed that I grew up in a shtetl, maybe one of the last remaining ones. I first wrote about this 40 years ago when I was president of my small congregation, and I’ve written and spoken about it many times since then. Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, had perhaps 25,000 Jewish people living in them. That number has not quite doubled even today. They mostly lived clustered together in a few areas of the cities and some suburbs, partly because there were areas with covenants against selling houses to Jewish buyers.

It appeared that our parents were connected to everybody else in the area. Nobody was a stranger. Everybody was the son or daughter of somebody that our parents knew. In desperation, we Saint Paul girls dated Minneapolis boys, but that didn’t really help much; he might not be somebody’s son, but he was almost certainly somebody’s nephew and they knew the family well.

Everybody knew me and everything that I was up to, in true small-town fashion. When I was younger, my hair was almost to my waist and hadn’t seen a razor in years. Yet I could pick my mother up at the beauty salon and the women who worked there knew just who I was and which one was my mother. Of course, that was the famous beauty parlor in Highland Park frequented by all of the Jewish women in the area, the place that they went to weekly mainly to catch up on all the goings-on. After I moved away from town and Bob Dylan’s mother moved off the Iron Range and down to Saint Paul, she went there, too, and was quickly integrated into the community.

I have watched the movie Avalon several times, and it reminds me so much of my childhood. Not only was my community small and insular, but my family was very close. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and all of my grandparents lived within walking distance, and we were together all of the time. Every event, every weekend, every non-event brought us together. My cousins were additional brothers and sisters to me and my aunts and uncles helped raise me as if they too were my parents. The rest of the people who lived in the city seemed to me like extras hired to fill out the population, but it was all about my family. And if we weren’t going to each other’s houses or a lake for a picnic or something else in the neighborhood, it’s because we had rented adjacent housekeeping cabins on a lake out of town (yes, there are lakes in Minnesota. 10,000 is an understatement; I was told it was 15,007 when I was in college) to share our vacation time.

We even had a “cousins’ club” comprised of my father’s first cousins and siblings and all of their relatives, and we had frequent gatherings of this much larger group as well.

At the time, it seemed cloying, intrusive. I felt that I had no privacy and no secrets. As the smallest of the daughters of my mother’s friends, I even got to wear all the clothes that I had seen on the other girls earlier. I had to get away and be anonymous!

But now? Now I’m wistful because my children will never know this experience; they grew up so far away from their cousins and their grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I miss having family around and am thrilled that I have two first cousins living in the area now and at various times have had an aunt or an uncle here, too. This is a world that is rapidly disappearing, with families scattering all over the world as they follow various opportunities. Not many people these days grow up surrounded by extended family.