In February 1947, tightly clutching their nine months old daughter, Ruth, psychologically tormented survivors of the Lublin ghetto, Nuchim and Bronia Green boarded the Marine Perch, a former U.S. military transport ship. On board were three hundred and ten other lucky “grines" (pronounced greenehs), a name given to Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, best translated as greenhorns to sail from Bremenhaven Germany to the promised land…America.
Ever optimistic, Nuchim was grateful his American uncle Noah Freedman facilitated his family immigration. Nuchim had high expectations his uncle would make him a partner in the wholesale leather business in Manhattan. When Freedman offered his nephew “low skilled work,” wrapping leather hides, Nuchim quit. Drifting through several menial jobs –selling hot dogs, fixing screens-- an article in the Yiddish newspaper caught Nuchim’s attention. It offered “to help Jewish people settle on poultry farms.”
A Lubliner, city boy who couldn’t tell a chicken from a turkey, Nuchim embellished his agricultural experience to qualify for a $1,500 loan from JAS (Jewish Agricultural Society). He persuaded refugee friends Jack and Dina Liverant to settle on ten acres of farmland in an obscure place, seven miles outside of Vineland, South Jersey. Kicking up a flotilla of dust and feathers, a chorus of 35,000 cackling chickens heralded the arrival of the two families.
Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is a fascinating history of Jews who chose or, in most cases, had no choice to seek sustainable work in America’s rural communities. Author Seth Stern profiles the lives of dozens of greenhorns who assimilated into an alien culture within an anti-Semitic community that shunned them. Stern paints a vivid portrait of their indefatigable struggle to fit in with the American-born Jews and find acceptance with “high grade” Yekkes (German Jews) who ostracized and looked down on the less cultured, Polish arrivals typecast as “aggressive and maladjusted.”
Stern poignantly describes the myriad obstacles the fledgling farmers had to overcome, barely making a go of it when chicken feed became more expensive than the eggs they sold. Enduring endless, mind-numbing cacophony of noise and stench in the chicken coops, the naive farmers quickly learned the urgency to vaccinate their charges before the entire flock succumbed to disease. Tips from the monthly periodical The Jewish Farmer plus a connection to the Israeli pioneers in the new state after 1948 helped to transform the emigres from rank amateurs into skilled farmers. Self-conscious and insecure, many more years would pass before the grines gained confidence to talk publicly about their past or engage in dialogue about America’s role during the Holocaust.
Based on the author’s grandparents’ experience, Speaking Yiddish to Chickens expands beyond the “survivor bubble” of one immigrant generation into a compelling record of American poultry farming, kosher style.
