Speaking Yiddish to Chickens: Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey Poultry Farms by Seth Stern (review)

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• Speaking Yiddish to Chickens: Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey Poultry Farms by Seth Stern
• Marjorie N. Feld (bio)

Speaking Yiddish to Chickens: Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey Poultry Farms. By Seth Stern. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023. x + 313 pp.

Speaking Yiddish to Chickens: Holocaust Survivors on South Jersey Poultry Farms leads with an author's note by Seth Stern, a legal journalist [End Page 802] and editor at Bloomberg Industry Group, informing readers that his book began with a "series of conversations that I had with my grandmother" (ix). Stern's familial connection is central to this little-known chapter of American and American Jewish history, a period when Holocaust survivors—including his grandparents—settled in Vineland, New Jersey, and worked as poultry farmers striving to rebuild their lives in the United States. These were a few thousand of the 140,000 survivors who arrived in the United States after World War II, and they were known as Grine, "a play on the Yiddish word for greenhorn" (2).

Based on oral histories and thorough archival research, Stern's book simultaneously captures individual lives and broader social currents. He tells the story of the Grine as but one chapter in the history of Jewish farming, which stretched back into the nineteenth century. It is the story, too, of Jewish philanthropic leaders who sought to demonstrate the potential social and economic contributions of Jewish immigrants by setting them up in an industry that required little startup capital. Poultry farming might help reduce the potential for xenophobia in crowded cities, these leaders thought, as "every refugee placed on a farm was one less Jew who could be accused of taking an American's job" (24).

The story of the Grine intersects with the history of the transition from small-scale to industrial agriculture in the United States. Into the 1960s, these farmers boosted New Jersey's poultry industry, the "top agricultural enterprise" in the Garden State (166). The industry was gradually eclipsed by the large-scale farming and huge grocery stores that are the foundation of our (unsustainable) food system today.

Finally, as the title suggests, this is also a story of Yiddish language and culture. "Just as survivors in New York helped breathe new life into Yiddish theater," Stern writes, "the Grine in Vineland helped revive Yiddish culture in an area" where many had forgotten the language (156). There were, predictably, tensions with non-Jews and also with Jews who had lived in the U.S. for generations. Rural settlements such as the poultry farms in Vineland served as a refuge for survivors, "a physical and emotional buffer that allowed them to avoid uncomfortable interactions with nonsurvivors" (82). Stern also includes stories of native-born American Jews who treated the Grine with compassion and understanding.

With a focus on the lives the Grine made in Vineland, there is little material on Holocaust experiences here; that is not the subject of this book. Yet the intense and profound destruction and loss faced by these survivors in Europe of course carried into their American lives in complex and diverse ways. There is grief, the yearning for kinship when hundreds of family members had been murdered; there are unspeakable wounds, nightmares, deep terror at the prospect of losing the people they love. Commenting on a documentary made about the Grine a few decades [End Page 803] ago, Stern writes that to focus only on their "trauma and its impact" is "to tell only part of the story" (226-227). Stern abides by this maxim, writing about these families beautifully, even with grace. We see the Grine as agents in their own lives, creating kin networks, carving out livelihoods, memorializing loss, and adapting as all immigrants do.

And so the poultry farmers raised chickens, sold eggs, founded synagogues and mutual aid societies, planned cultural activities, sent their children to camp, and advocated for themselves (even in Washington, D.C.) during difficult times. They created a community whose scandals, celebrations, and struggles Stern records. Eventually, as the small-scale poultry farming industry collapsed and as middle-class aspirations drew newer generations out of Vineland, the families had to learn new ways to make...