Among the nearly 350,000 German and Austrian Jews who fled from Nazism between Hitler's ascension to power and the beginning of the Second World War, tens of thousands ended up in New York or London. In this admirably concise, deftly crafted monograph, Lori Gemeiner Bihler assesses the experiences of Jewish refugees in these large, mostly Anglophone metropolitan areas. The result is a provocative and engaging work of comparative history that will be of use to scholars of refugees and immigration.
The comparative framework is critical to Bihler's purpose, which is to critically evaluate the trope that Jewish immigrants integrated relatively quickly in the United States because they were “recipients of a greater tradition of tolerance and diversity” (xi). In this older narrative, migrants to Britain faced greater barriers because of the homogeneity and rigidity of British society. Bihler presents a considerably more nuanced analysis, one that pays close attention to the historical circumstances of the arrival and subsequent establishment of Jewish refugee communities in these cities.
The study, inspired in part by the author's experience growing up with refugee grandparents in Washington Heights, draws from a range of archival, published, and oral history sources to paint a picture of the “myriad ways in which German Jews retained, relinquished, and practiced their cultures and identities” (13). The use of oral history and later memoirs is potentially problematic because they are presumably influenced by some of the same narratives that Bihler is critiquing, but they certainly enliven the text of the monograph.
The core chapters of this brief book offer a series of generally fascinating insights. Migrants arrived in London and New York with preconceived ideas about the societies where they found themselves, but those notions paled in importance compared to the different legal circumstances under which they came to Britain and the United States. Those arriving in the United States typically had the right to remain long term and could often legally work in a range of fields. Arrivals in Britain typically came with short-term visas and sometimes found themselves engaged as domestic workers. Thousands of Jewish children, who came as part of the Kindertransport programs, often lived apart from the wider Jewish community in Britain. Anti-German sentiment in Britain caused many to try to disguise their heritage, while German bombing dispersed Londoners of all backgrounds into shelters, temporary accommodation, or the countryside.
German Jews in New York faced less pressure to avoid speaking German in public, to de-Germanize their surnames, or to change their dress style. In London, where a number of male Jews were interned as enemy aliens, speaking German where others might overhear could mean trouble. Educated middle-class Jews found that clothing befitting their previous station looked out of place in new circumstances of precarious employment and material want. Jews in New York had access to food that they recognized from their former lives, while wartime shortages and rationing in London compelled new arrivals to accommodate to local tastes and circumstances.
In the excellent chapter on identify formation, Bihler makes a compelling point that Jews in these two cities used different terms to describe themselves. In German- or English-language interviews, Jews in New York disproportionately described themselves as “immigrants,” whereas those in London talked about themselves as “refugees.” As she notes, those categories were fluid. Both contemporaries and scholars have struggled to develop a consistent vocabulary to describe Jews who fled from Nazism. More context would have helped here. Given Bihler's interest in oral history, it might be interesting to track how these self-identities have changed as debates over immigration in Britain and the United States shifted in subsequent decades.
The biggest concern that I have about the study is that Bihler pays little attention to the preexisting Jewish communities in London or New York, which encountered and helped to shape the experiences of new arrivals in the 1930s. Both cities had linguistically and religiously diverse Jewish populations before 1933. New York was one of the most important centers of Jewish life anywhere in the world, thanks to waves of immigration over the previous half century. There are moments throughout the book where Bihler might have fleshed out these complex dynamics, such as her observation that “abundant” delicatessens helped migrants to New York retain their central European foodways (63).
Readers may wonder what happened to Austria in this volume. The author is clearly writing about central European Jewish migrants, but she usually describes them as “Germans” and includes introductory material about Jews in Imperial and Weimar Germany. Although many of the migrants about whom she writes did share cultural, political, and social commonalities, she flattens out some very real differences within these communities. On a stylistic level, the book still bears the apparatus of the doctoral dissertation from which it emerged. The historiography can be heavy-handed and repetitive.
These critiques aside, Bihler has written a monograph that will undoubtedly spur more discussion and debate. In an act of all-too-rare scholarly humility, she even provides a list of topics and questions that she could not answer, or that others might usefully explore, in her conclusion. Scholars and students searching for new research topics related to the global migration of Jews from the lengthening shadows of Hitler's Europe will greatly profit from reading this book.
