Speaker 1: Hello everyone. My name is frieda basel and in New
Speaker 1: York City, Brooklyn based Jewsh YouTuber with an interest in
Speaker 1: all things Jewish, subcultures, religion, New York City, and human
Speaker 1: interest stories. Today we are going to talk about the
Speaker 1: National Desertion Bureau. Popular stereotypes about Jewsh husbands are usually positive.
Speaker 1: They're loyal, they're good providers, they don't drink to excess,
Speaker 1: and they are in violent. It's no wonder that most
Speaker 1: people have never heard of the National Desertion Bureau, an
Speaker 1: agency created in New York in nineteen eleven to track
Speaker 1: down runaway Jewish husbands and bring them to justice. Turns
Speaker 1: out that the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern
Speaker 1: Europe to North America was accompanied by terrible cultural and
Speaker 1: social upheaval, poverty, and failure. One sad feature of his
Speaker 1: era was the phenomenon of broken families, which occurred on
Speaker 1: a mass scale. The problem of Jewish men abandoning their
Speaker 1: families was so severe that, along with the National Desertion Bureau,
Speaker 1: Yiddish newspapers like the Farvards, with a daily readership in
Speaker 1: the hundreds of thousands, published a popular column called the
Speaker 1: Gallery of Missing Husbands, which featured mugshots and descriptions of
Speaker 1: men who had left their wives and families in the lurch.
Speaker 1: There were even local psychics on the Lower East Side
Speaker 1: who specialized in tracking down missing husbands, addressing a true
Speaker 1: social epidemic in the Jewish community. The National Desertion Bureau
Speaker 1: worked with a multiplicity of governmental and private organizations to
Speaker 1: find these men and force them to pay alimony, child support,
Speaker 1: and serve jail time if they didn't. From nineteen oh
Speaker 1: five through the nineteen sixties, the Bureau attracted more than
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand cases. Its files are rich in details and
Speaker 1: are often short novellas onto themselves, with details on the
Speaker 1: tragedy of maritaled solution, abandoned children, and financial ruin. The
Speaker 1: Evil Archive houses approximately seventeen thousand National Assertion Bureau case
Speaker 1: files that were generated between nineteen oh five and the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. EVO put together an exhibition on this called
Speaker 1: Runaway Husbands Desperate Families The Story of the National Desertion Bureau,
Speaker 1: which traces the history of the National Assertion Bureau and
Speaker 1: includes never before seeing records, documents, and photographs from the
Speaker 1: organization's luminous archives. This was a project curated by Eddie
Speaker 1: Portnoy from Yevo. I've had the great pleasure of having
Speaker 1: Eddie on my program before when we discussed the Yiddish language,
Speaker 1: and today Eddie will share with us in depth story
Speaker 1: of this dark episode. Before we begin, I want to
Speaker 1: take just a moment to thank those of you who
Speaker 1: are members of this channel. Members of this channel helped
Speaker 1: make this work possible. It's very time consuming work. I
Speaker 1: published videos early for members, so I get to interact
Speaker 1: early with those of you who are in person. I
Speaker 1: thank you so very much. And now Eddie, thank you
Speaker 1: so very.
Speaker 2: Much for being here, Thanks for having me for you
Speaker 2: that it's a pleasure to be invited back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm happy you're back. It's been too long. That
Speaker 1: conversation about Yiddish. People loved it. People were absolutely fascinated
Speaker 1: by it.
Speaker 2: That's great. Yeah, yeah, I mean looks interesting.
Speaker 1: Yiddish, is it? I mean we're biased, but I think so, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I guess we are biased. You know, language I think
Speaker 2: is interesting as a whole, and so you know, Yiddish
Speaker 2: because it's it's something close to home. It's it's even
Speaker 2: more interesting, it's even more interesting.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about this project of the National Desertion Bureau,
Speaker 1: which is mind blowing. And did you write that the
Speaker 1: whole description I lifted off of the exhibition.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I plagiarism. I wrote something, and then the woman
Speaker 2: who handles the website and social media probably worked on it.
Speaker 2: But that's yeah, I wrote. I wrote most of that.
Speaker 1: I was very interesting.
Speaker 2: It's it's a fascinating organization and the phenomenon is also interesting,
Speaker 2: and it's not something that people are terribly familiar with.
Speaker 2: I think that when people talk about, you know, the
Speaker 2: great mass migration of Jews to the United States from
Speaker 2: Eastern Europe, and this is begins, you know, before the
Speaker 2: eighteen eighty you know, when they talk about mass migration,
Speaker 2: it's from really from eighteen eighty one to nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 2: and it's a period where approximately two million Jews came
Speaker 2: to North America from Eastern Europe and that's an enormous number.
Speaker 2: The vast majority of them settled in around New York
Speaker 2: and that migration created places like the Lower East Side,
Speaker 2: which for many people was the Plymouth Rock. It was
Speaker 2: sort of the first location of residents for many Jews.
Speaker 2: And you know, I think by the nineteen twenties, there
Speaker 2: was something like half a million Jews living just on
Speaker 2: the Lower east Side. You know, this doesn't include Brooklyn, Harlem,
Speaker 2: other places in the Bronx, other places in and around
Speaker 2: New York City. And so the Lower East Side was
Speaker 2: this roiling urban ghetto that was mostly populated by Jews.
Speaker 2: And at the time, Jews made up about twenty percent
Speaker 2: of New York City's population, which is a lot.
Speaker 1: What is the percent now?
Speaker 2: The percent is lower, and I want to say it's
Speaker 2: like ten twelve percent now, which is still a lot,
Speaker 2: considering the Jew in the world are a tiny minority.
Speaker 2: But in the in the twenties, in the interwar period,
Speaker 2: between the two World Wars, this was the time when
Speaker 2: you had like a Yiddish mass media. You had five
Speaker 2: daily newspapers in Yiddish, and obviously print media is the
Speaker 2: only media. Now there's like a zillion different kinds of
Speaker 2: media and it's all very confusing. But you had Yiddish theaters,
Speaker 2: you had synagogues and steembles of all different sorts. Every
Speaker 2: block had I mean, it was just a totally different world.
Speaker 2: Is like, you know, Yeden's don't even an eingepack in
Speaker 2: ain Geg. You know, Jews were like really crammed into
Speaker 2: one little area and it created its own kind of
Speaker 2: unique culture.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: In addition to that, they were very poor. Well that's
Speaker 2: one of the funny things, ort of the odd things
Speaker 2: about this, this mass migration in Eastern Europe, they were
Speaker 2: also very poor, and to a large degree that's why
Speaker 2: they came to the United States. You know, certainly they
Speaker 2: were pushed along by the fact that they were oppressed
Speaker 2: and botally ostracized. They didn't have civil rights in many places.
Speaker 2: They had for many years that had pay special taxes
Speaker 2: on certain things, on meat and candles. Wow, what kind
Speaker 2: of you know, they treated very much as a separate
Speaker 2: minority in Eastern Europe, especially under Russian rule. And so
Speaker 2: when it became a parent that America was accepting large
Speaker 2: numbers of immigrants, the Jews took them up on that.
Speaker 2: You know, so many many came. And what's interesting about
Speaker 2: this immigration is when most people think about it, it's
Speaker 2: considered something very successful. And what that means is Jewish
Speaker 2: immigrants came here, they sent their kids to school, their
Speaker 2: kids went to college, large swaths of them became professionals,
Speaker 2: meeting doctors, dentists, lawyers, accounts, whatever, And within one to
Speaker 2: two generations Jews who had come here, who worked in sweatshops,
Speaker 2: who worked in the garment industry, who were peddlers on
Speaker 2: the street, and still very poor. That immigrant generation was very,
Speaker 2: very poor. They succeeded in launching their children to the
Speaker 2: American middle class, and so as a result, it's considered
Speaker 2: a very, very successful immigration, and I think that it's
Speaker 2: accurate to say that. But along the way there were
Speaker 2: certain things that transpire in which Jews encountered Jewish immigrants
Speaker 2: and American born Jews as well, who were born in
Speaker 2: immigrant neighborhoods, they encountered difficulties. There were crime was a
Speaker 2: big problem in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. There
Speaker 2: were lots of Jewish gangs and gangsters and criminals. I
Speaker 2: talked about percentages. New York City was about twenty percent
Speaker 2: Jewish nineteen twenties, So as a result, sing Sing Prison
Speaker 2: was also about twenty percent Jewish at the time. So
Speaker 2: when you're successful and you make to the middle class,
Speaker 2: there are certain things you forget historically because they're embarrassing.
Speaker 2: You don't really want to know about them. It's not
Speaker 2: something you want to dwell on because it's sort of
Speaker 2: a blip and what's ultimately a really nice success story.
Speaker 2: But these these blips they interest me as a historian.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're part of what happened.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, no exactly. And so you know, there's been
Speaker 2: a tendency to kind of I mean certainly, you know,
Speaker 2: there have been books written on you know, Jewish criminals
Speaker 2: and gangsters in mafia and things like that. My own
Speaker 2: personal interest is in the people who were, even like
Speaker 2: at a lower level. And so the only the only
Speaker 2: real record of those activities is the Yiddish press, which
Speaker 2: is full of all kinds of stories of Jews running
Speaker 2: into problems, whether it's crime or whether it's a broken
Speaker 2: broken marriage or broken home or business failure. The Yiddish
Speaker 2: press is the sounding board for this kind of activity historically.
Speaker 2: It's just really fascinating. And so the National Desertion Bureau
Speaker 2: is a great example of this kind of phenomenon. Just generally,
Speaker 2: it's not an unknown organization among historians. I think that
Speaker 2: for people Jews who may know a bit about history,
Speaker 2: or even a fair amount about history, may not have
Speaker 2: ever heard of it, and they may not have known
Speaker 2: that there was a problem with this immigrant generation, mostly
Speaker 2: men who were abandoning their wives and families, that it
Speaker 2: was a fairly severe social problem that affected the Jewish
Speaker 2: immigrant community. And I should also add that this affected
Speaker 2: every community. The difference is that it was treated differently,
Speaker 2: and so at the time there were lots of Irish
Speaker 2: and Italian immigrants in New York City. They had problems
Speaker 2: at a similar level, but they viewed family abandonment as
Speaker 2: a moral issue that the church had to deal with,
Speaker 2: and the National Assertion Bureau sought differently. They sought as
Speaker 2: a social issue, a social problem that could be dealt
Speaker 2: with by social workers and lawyers, administrative professionals, which is
Speaker 2: just a different way to view it. Go backward a
Speaker 2: bit the way this happened. The National Board of Jewish Charities,
Speaker 2: which was a large umbrella organization for all kinds of
Speaker 2: different Jewish charities, they noted in sort of internal documents
Speaker 2: in nineteen oh two that this issue was becoming a
Speaker 2: problem in the Jewish community. Women and children were being
Speaker 2: abandoned by men who were running off to different cities,
Speaker 2: different states, sometimes just different neighborhoods. So it was on
Speaker 2: their radar. One interesting note is that one of the
Speaker 2: ways that I found out about this was I was
Speaker 2: doing research on a particular psychic, a very well known
Speaker 2: Jewish psychic by the name of Abraham Hackman, who live
Speaker 2: on the Lower East Side. And he, I mean, he
Speaker 2: was a fortune teller and a huge amount of his
Speaker 2: business was based on his claim that he was a
Speaker 2: master at finding runaway husbands. And so there were newspapers
Speaker 2: of articles about him in the Yiddish press and even
Speaker 2: in the English press as well, because it was a
Speaker 2: fascinating human interest story. They write about how there would
Speaker 2: be women lined up outside of his stoop on Rivington
Speaker 2: Street in the morning waiting to hear where their husbands
Speaker 2: might be. And he loved getting publicity and love being
Speaker 2: written about in the papers, and so there are all
Speaker 2: these interesting articles. So there's a nineteen oh two article,
Speaker 2: I think it's like maybe could be nineteen oh three,
Speaker 2: in which a woman appears in his salon or in
Speaker 2: his office on Rivington Street and is looking for her husband,
Speaker 2: and he reads her fortune and he tells her that
Speaker 2: her husband will be at the corner of Pitt and
Speaker 2: Graham Streets at ten pm that night, and he tells her.
Speaker 2: He says, if he's not there, I will pay you
Speaker 2: fifty dollars, which like in nineteen oh two, ninety yo three,
Speaker 2: that's that's a lot of money change, that's a lot
Speaker 2: of money. So she goes to the local police station
Speaker 2: and finds a police officer and tells him this. He
Speaker 2: may have gone just out of curiosity. She explains that,
Speaker 2: you know, she's been abandoned by her husband, and she's
Speaker 2: been left destitute, and she has children that she has
Speaker 2: to take care of and she has no funding for them.
Speaker 2: And so she brings this police officer to pit in
Speaker 2: Grant at ten pm, and in fact, her husband is
Speaker 2: there like leaning against lampposts, and the police officer arrests him,
Speaker 2: and that brings him to court, and the judge says
Speaker 2: that he's got to pay a certain amount weekly in
Speaker 2: alimony or in child support rather. And it's this interesting
Speaker 2: and someone odd story that appears in the paper.
Speaker 1: What's the logical explanation?
Speaker 2: So Abraham Hawkman pulled other kind of similar stunts. There
Speaker 2: was another episode where there was a group of Jewish
Speaker 2: kids from the neighborhood had gotten arrested for burglary and
Speaker 2: they were in court being arraigned, and Hawkman walks into
Speaker 2: the courtroom and yells out, I'm paying bail for these kids.
Speaker 2: And the judge looks at me and says, who are you?
Speaker 2: And he says, I'm a clairvoyant and I know that
Speaker 2: tomorrow you will set them free. And the judge says, okay,
Speaker 2: if you want to pay bail, you could pay bail.
Speaker 2: So he pays their bail. The next day he comes
Speaker 2: back and the judge sets them free. And I don't
Speaker 2: know if he had gotten word that they didn't actually
Speaker 2: do it, Like, who knows? Yeah, okay, I see, or
Speaker 2: maybe he had you know, special town he had.
Speaker 1: Special I tend to I tend on the most suspicious
Speaker 1: side of things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also I tend to be skeptical of these
Speaker 2: things as well. But but it makes for a good story.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, and he's like he's a really he's a fascinating character.
Speaker 2: In addition to being a fortune teller, he owned a
Speaker 2: wedding hall. He had his own katubas printed up that
Speaker 2: he sold at the wedding hall. He also also published
Speaker 2: his own hagada called Like the Fortune Teller's Hagada. It's
Speaker 2: so funny because there are advertisements in the Hagada for
Speaker 2: people in the neighborhood. For I also think I suspected
Speaker 2: the owned owned a decent amount of real estate on
Speaker 2: his street, and so a lot of the people, the
Speaker 2: business people on his street were paying him rent and
Speaker 2: he got them to advertise in in the Hagata. There's
Speaker 2: you know, a local photographer whose ad is in there.
Speaker 2: There's also and this is actually perfect for for Pesach,
Speaker 2: there's a there's a doctor down the block from him
Speaker 2: that specializes and cures for constipation, which which like to
Speaker 2: put that right in the Hagata is what you need
Speaker 2: for this particular holiday. So it's really you know, he's
Speaker 2: a great character. He's really he's really funny. But his
Speaker 2: like I said, his specialty was finding missing husbands. And
Speaker 2: so this appears in the papers, and I know, I
Speaker 2: think that this is just a fascinating, fascinating topic. And
Speaker 2: so at the time, like I mentioned that the National
Speaker 2: Board of Jewish Charities, they discover that around that same time,
Speaker 2: few years after the turn of the twentieth century, that
Speaker 2: this is a problem with the immigrant Jewish community, And
Speaker 2: in fact, in nineteen oh five, the National Board of
Speaker 2: Jewish Charities creates an organization called I'm going to get
Speaker 2: it wrong, but it's something like a Society for the
Speaker 2: Protection of Abandoned Women and Children or Deserted Women and Children,
Speaker 2: something like that. And this was a charitable organization that
Speaker 2: women with families could go to and get funds to
Speaker 2: live on. After a few years of doing that, the
Speaker 2: National Jewish Charities realizes that it's not a good system
Speaker 2: because what's happening is that they're giving money to families
Speaker 2: whose fathers and husbands have left them, and as a result,
Speaker 2: they become dependent on the charity because the husbands, if
Speaker 2: they become aware that their families are being funded, they
Speaker 2: don't bother yeah sending them money or giving them anything
Speaker 2: in any way. So they realized that they had to
Speaker 2: take a different tack, and so it doesn't happen until
Speaker 2: about five six years later. But in the meantime it
Speaker 2: becomes such a problem that it becomes very common to
Speaker 2: see in Yiddish papers advertisements from abandoned families saying, our
Speaker 2: husband Sloimish laputnik whatever you know. I don't want to
Speaker 2: give a real name because it could be someone's name.
Speaker 2: Explain that our husband father has left us where destitute,
Speaker 2: we have no way to make a living. He is
Speaker 2: originally from such and such a place. We think he
Speaker 2: may have gone to Cleveland or Saint Louis or Los
Speaker 2: Angeles or wherever. And they want people to find them
Speaker 2: and so they could get supported in some way. They
Speaker 2: wanted support. And so what happens is is the the
Speaker 2: Yiddish Forvarts, which at the time had become the largest
Speaker 2: and most successful and important Yiddish paper. They in nineteen
Speaker 2: oh eight they start a it's not daily when it starts,
Speaker 2: but it becomes very regular, very quickly. They start a
Speaker 2: column called the Galleria funfoch Fundenmene the Gallery of Missing Men.
Speaker 2: And what they do is they put in mugshots of
Speaker 2: the men. Obviously women are setting in mugshots or they're
Speaker 2: setting in photographs the force. They're putting these like little pictures,
Speaker 2: and there's usually they usually set them up as like
Speaker 2: six people in a row, and below them are descriptions
Speaker 2: of them, what town in Europe they're from, what their
Speaker 2: jobs are, you know, where they think they went. They
Speaker 2: mentioned the families that they left. And the idea was
Speaker 2: that the public it was it was really kind of
Speaker 2: a way of crowdsourcing in which the idea was to
Speaker 2: turn these guys in, bring them to justice. They you know,
Speaker 2: they you know, they had done something terrible. They abandoned
Speaker 2: their wives and families. And the forwards starts this column.
Speaker 2: And what's interesting is it becomes very popular. It's like
Speaker 2: the page that the people first turn to because they
Speaker 2: want to see if their neighbors, friends and relatives are
Speaker 2: like in the galleria, when freshmen in the manor, if
Speaker 2: they're in this, if they're in these mugshots and so
Speaker 2: so it becomes popular and you know, Yiddish humor magazines
Speaker 2: do parodies of it. And then in nineteen eleven, the
Speaker 2: National Desertion Bureau creates the I'm Sorry in the Jewish
Speaker 2: Board of Charities. National Jewish Board of Charities creates the
Speaker 2: National Desertion Bureau and the purpose of it is to
Speaker 2: find missing husbands have gone who knows where. And it's
Speaker 2: run by two attorneys, Sounzara and Monroe Goldstein, and it's
Speaker 2: staffed by social workers. And they opened up offices on
Speaker 2: Second Avenue in the Lower East Side, and they're written
Speaker 2: about in the paper and they put an advertisement in
Speaker 2: the paper explaining what they do, and they say that
Speaker 2: women can come to them and their purpose, their mandate
Speaker 2: is to find these missing men and bring them to
Speaker 2: justice and to fund these women. But it worked is
Speaker 2: like a woman. If a woman was abandoned, she would
Speaker 2: go into the office and fill out an application. And
Speaker 2: it was sort of small, four column application and it
Speaker 2: had basic information, names, addresses, names of children, where people
Speaker 2: are from, why, why they think the man abandoned.
Speaker 1: Them, what kind of answers would they give.
Speaker 2: So this was actually a really interesting part of the exhibit.
Speaker 2: So within the exhibit itself, we had there are two large,
Speaker 2: i want to say, eighteen inch wide columns in the
Speaker 2: exhibit space, and so we took those and we from
Speaker 2: florid to ceiling, we put like thousands of reasons as
Speaker 2: to why they left. So the National Desertion Bureau was
Speaker 2: created by the National Board of Jewish Charities, which is
Speaker 2: now something called the Jewish Board, and in fact the
Speaker 2: Jewish Board which still is a Jewish charitable organization. They
Speaker 2: sponsored the exhibit and one of the things that they
Speaker 2: did was they extracted all of these reasons out of
Speaker 2: the applications just because I think they thought it was
Speaker 2: interesting and I could I have a list of them
Speaker 2: here and I could read you some of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's hear some of them. That sounds so interesting, Yeah.
Speaker 2: They're really there's some of them were really fat, fascinating
Speaker 2: So infidelity. One woman wrote, cannot account for desertion. Another
Speaker 2: wrote man threatened to kill her. Another man suffers from
Speaker 2: hallucinations regarding the applicant's morality. Man claims his wife is disagreeable.
Speaker 2: Man is a gentile. Man absconded when his wife learned
Speaker 2: that he was Jewish. So you have both sides of
Speaker 2: that story. Man stole money and jewelry, fear to rest,
Speaker 2: absconded money and left. Man annoying children after divorce obtained
Speaker 2: to nineteen fifteen man's polygamous nature? What does that mean?
Speaker 2: Cheating man's nature? It's a man who got married multiple times.
Speaker 2: There are also some cases where women abandoned men, although
Speaker 2: the vast majority of them are men who abandoned women.
Speaker 2: Let's see, here's one. Husband was young and irresponsible. Oh,
Speaker 2: the woman ousted him from her home. Wanted to escape
Speaker 2: military service, extreme jealousy on the husband's part, sexual incompatibility.
Speaker 2: The wife refused to keep borders. Man rakes over a
Speaker 2: woman's past. I mean, they're like there was one one
Speaker 2: of my favorites was women didn't like Baltimore. Moved to Baltimore,
Speaker 2: she didn't like it. And that's what so interesting about
Speaker 2: this particular archive and these applications is that they give
Speaker 2: you insight into the family and marital problems of common people.
Speaker 2: And as a historian, that's interesting because you don't typically
Speaker 2: get details about common people unless it's in the newspapers
Speaker 2: or you know, the cases. The cases are unique, like
Speaker 2: history is typically written about, you know, humanity's great people,
Speaker 2: most successful people, business people, doctors, artists, writers, politicians. Those
Speaker 2: are the people who make history, you know, as opposed
Speaker 2: to just your average person who works a job, as
Speaker 2: a family, lives a life, doesn't produce anything of note.
Speaker 2: And that's really the vast majority of people. Obviously, because
Speaker 2: of the Internet, everyone is visible weird. But prior to this,
Speaker 2: nobody knew from these people, and it's just such a
Speaker 2: fascinating look into their lives. Sometimes the files give you
Speaker 2: very granular detail about these stories and how they played out,
Speaker 2: and you also learn all kinds of things about these people.
Speaker 2: One fascinating side note is these files are a gold
Speaker 2: mine for people working in genialogy, anyone who's researching family history.
Speaker 2: If you have a family, if you have an ancestor
Speaker 2: that is in these files.
Speaker 1: You have a ton of information.
Speaker 2: You could really find out a lot. You could find
Speaker 2: out what they worked in. First of all, all of
Speaker 2: the standard immigration information that you can find in other places,
Speaker 2: but it's all focused here. But it's also what languages
Speaker 2: they spoke, if they went to school preter yeshiva, what
Speaker 2: towns they were from. The level of detail is really
Speaker 2: is really pretty fascinating. I could give you one example
Speaker 2: of which it's one of the stories that we that
Speaker 2: we featured in the exhibit. It was the gold Farms.
Speaker 2: It was a family by the name of Nathan and
Speaker 2: Lana gold Farm, and they lived on the Upper east Side,
Speaker 2: not in like the fancy Upper east Side. They lived
Speaker 2: in like ninety third Street East ninety third Street. Nathan
Speaker 2: was a watchmaker, which is you're not in a sweatshops,
Speaker 2: it's a slightly higher level job. And they had three chldren,
Speaker 2: all of whom were under six years old. They also
Speaker 2: had an extra room in their apartment which they rented
Speaker 2: to a border by the name of Mini Chech. There
Speaker 2: So one day Lena comes home and she catches Minnie
Speaker 2: and Nathan in the act I see, and of course
Speaker 2: no one's happy with this situation. And so what happens
Speaker 2: is Nathan and Minnie take off Nathan, they run away.
Speaker 2: And but what happens is this leaves Lena and the
Speaker 2: three children with nothing. She doesn't have a job, she
Speaker 2: can't pay rent, she can't buy groceries. You know, the
Speaker 2: kids aren't and you know what, maybe one and I
Speaker 2: don't know, one of them may have started kindergarten. But
Speaker 2: it's it's a terrible situation, and she has no way
Speaker 2: to support herself. This case takes place accidentally in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2: So she goes to the offices of the National Desertion Bureau.
Speaker 2: She gives them a photograph and she fills out an
Speaker 2: application describing him, saying where he's from, how they met,
Speaker 2: when they got married, what languages he speaks, what jobs
Speaker 2: he's done, Who they know, because the National Assertion Bureau
Speaker 2: is it's almost like an investigations agency for immigrant Jews,
Speaker 2: like private eyes. Yeah, they initiate an investigation. They're social workers.
Speaker 2: They know the names of the man's family members who
Speaker 2: are in the country and they sent they send people
Speaker 2: out to interview family members and co workers, and they
Speaker 2: get no information. And so what they do is they
Speaker 2: take his photograph and they send it to the four
Speaker 2: Verts so it can be placed in the galleria fund
Speaker 2: Flushwood and the Mena in the gallery of Missing Missing Husbands,
Speaker 2: And so that appears. A few months later. In the meantime,
Speaker 2: Lena moves to a cheaper apartment on the Lower east
Speaker 2: Side and one of the interesting documents in the file
Speaker 2: is her business card. And her business card is in Yiddish,
Speaker 2: but it's in sort of an English Yiddish. And what
Speaker 2: she did is she rented a small apartment on the
Speaker 2: Lower east Side and opened up a kosher restaurant in
Speaker 2: the apartment. It's a non license illegal technically not supposed
Speaker 2: to do this or you're you know, it's not a
Speaker 2: real restaurant. But it's basically an unlicensed restaurant in an apartment.
Speaker 2: And she probably went around the Lower east Side giving
Speaker 2: out this card to, you know, workers in the neighborhood
Speaker 2: who could come for a kosher lunch. And it was
Speaker 2: a way for her to earn money and work and
Speaker 2: watch her children at the same time. Because if she
Speaker 2: goes to work at a factory, she's got to get
Speaker 2: a babysitter, or she's got to put her her children
Speaker 2: with another family, which is a difficult situation. So this
Speaker 2: this was really kind of a clever way for a
Speaker 2: woman to be able to watch her children and work
Speaker 2: at the same time and make a living. So in
Speaker 2: the meantime, the picture and description of Nathan Goldfarb goes
Speaker 2: up in the gallery of Missing Husbands, and a few
Speaker 2: months later the forward the Forwards gets a letter which
Speaker 2: they sent to the National Desertion Bureau that says, I
Speaker 2: have seen this man going around with a woman he
Speaker 2: claims with his wife in Los Angeles, and he works
Speaker 2: at such and such a factory, and they give the
Speaker 2: address and in the letter it says, don't tell anyone
Speaker 2: I said this. So the National Desertion Bureau has contacts
Speaker 2: in not only in every city in the country that
Speaker 2: has a Jewish community, but throughout the world. They have
Speaker 2: contacts everywhere there's a Jewish community. And so what they
Speaker 2: do is they send a letter to their contact in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles, who initiates an investigation there. But unfortunately they
Speaker 2: don't find anything. But that what they do here is
Speaker 2: a rumor that the couple went to San Francisco. So
Speaker 2: the National Desertion Bureau sends all the same information, you know,
Speaker 2: copy of the of the application and photograph to their
Speaker 2: contact in San Francisco, who happens to be a lawyer.
Speaker 2: He initiates an investigation and what he finds is that
Speaker 2: this couple is living in a fruit shop in the
Speaker 2: town of Alameda, which is a suburb of San Francisco,
Speaker 2: and they're owner in a fruit shop owned by the
Speaker 2: man whose name is Solomon Garfinkel. And the National Desertion
Speaker 2: Bureau contact San Francisco tracks these people for a number
Speaker 2: of months, and what he discovers is that the three
Speaker 2: of them are involved in a local free love commune.
Speaker 2: What Yeah, total twist, right, And it's nineteen thirteen, So
Speaker 2: it's like people are, I guess, a lot more free
Speaker 2: thinking than than you think you give them credit for.
Speaker 1: So is it like a Jewish commune.
Speaker 2: There's no detail about the commune itself. It may have been.
Speaker 2: This is not related to this at all, But a
Speaker 2: few years ago I read an article about a vegetarian
Speaker 2: nudist colony in New Jersey that was entirely Jewish and
Speaker 2: Yiddish speaking, and this was like it started in nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 3: So you know they're all kinds of you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: when there are enough people, there are gonna be weird stuff.
Speaker 2: You know, people do all kinds of things and you know.
Speaker 1: Vegetarian, Nuddhist, Yiddish speaking.
Speaker 2: Wow, right, I could say, I can send you a link.
Speaker 2: It's it's an unusual story. So what happens, So what happens,
Speaker 2: what happens with this with this couple is that Minnie Scheckter,
Speaker 2: the woman whom Nathan ran away with, and you know,
Speaker 2: they're living in this fruit sure with you know, they're
Speaker 2: living this fruit shop owned by Solomon Garfinkel. Also Solomon
Speaker 2: Garfinkel's his business card is also in the file. So
Speaker 2: there's there's all this detritus related to the case that's
Speaker 2: in the file that just enriches the story. So what
Speaker 2: happens is is that Minnie falls in love with Solomon Garfinkel,
Speaker 2: the guy who is the fruit chop, and they get
Speaker 2: married and he moves her out of the fruit shop
Speaker 2: and they move into a house in Alameda. So Nathan
Speaker 2: is furious because he's upended his whole life, left his
Speaker 2: wife and family in New York for Minnie and she
Speaker 2: leaves him for another guy. He had a coming, He
Speaker 2: totally had a coming. So so he's mad, and he
Speaker 2: finds the house they're living in and he begins to
Speaker 2: harass them, and he rasses them to a point where
Speaker 2: they move out of the house into an apartment in
Speaker 2: San Francisco, but he finds them there too, and he
Speaker 2: continues to harass them. What they do is they find
Speaker 2: the lawyer who works as the contact for the National
Speaker 2: Desertion Bureau in San Francisco, and they say to him,
Speaker 2: if you threaten to prosecute him for child abandonment, he
Speaker 2: could be convinced to go back to New York to
Speaker 2: his wife and children. And that's what they do. The lawyer,
Speaker 2: you know, sends a letter threatening to prosecute him for
Speaker 2: child abandonment, but he won't if you know, if he
Speaker 2: goes if he reconciles with his wife in New York.
Speaker 2: And in fact, he goes back to New York and
Speaker 2: reconciles with his wife. And that's the end of the file.
Speaker 2: And it's such a fascinating story. Now within those files
Speaker 2: there are all kinds of I wouldn't say that there
Speaker 2: are a lot of you know, love commune stories or
Speaker 2: free love communist stories, but you know, there are all
Speaker 2: kinds of stories where people leave for all kinds of
Speaker 2: different reasons. They wind up in all kinds of different places,
Speaker 2: whether it's like Cleveland or I don't know, Baltimore or wherever,
Speaker 2: and the National Resertion Bureau tracks these people down. And
Speaker 2: what's amazing, there's a woman who wrote a book about this,
Speaker 2: the title of which is Escaping. Her name is Anna
Speaker 2: Egra Igra, and she estimated that based out like a
Speaker 2: sample of I don't know, three or four hundred cases
Speaker 2: that she looked at, she estimated that they found the man,
Speaker 2: they found the runaway man in about seventy five percent
Speaker 2: of the cases, which is really kind of a huge number,
Speaker 2: and they're finding them. You know, there's no internet. There
Speaker 2: aren't even any phones or maybe there are sub phones
Speaker 2: by it during some period. Yeah, there are phones during
Speaker 2: some period of it. But it's all through the press, letter,
Speaker 2: all through newspapers and telegrams and postcards and letters to
Speaker 2: all kinds of different people. So there are cases and
Speaker 2: the contacts very widely. Like I mentioned that the contact
Speaker 2: in San Francisco was a lawyer. So I found cases
Speaker 2: where the National Resertions Bureau's contact was the secretary who
Speaker 2: worked at the JCC in the Saint Louis You're the
Speaker 2: Jewish Community Center, or it was like a local rabbi
Speaker 2: in Nashville, like it could have been anybody. It didn't
Speaker 2: have to be a professional. It was just someone who
Speaker 2: knew the community. And in immigrant community is when a
Speaker 2: new person arrives, people talk. They're like, oh, hey, especially
Speaker 2: if it's a smaller community. So and so showed up.
Speaker 2: Who is that. It's like someone showing up with the Stethel.
Speaker 2: It's someone new. Let's talk, you know, we need to
Speaker 2: talk about this. Where are they coming from, what's their purpose,
Speaker 2: what are they doing? And if there's a scandal behind it,
Speaker 2: it becomes an even bigger topic of conversation.
Speaker 1: What happens with let's say a story like this couple
Speaker 1: with the Free Love Commune, which it's like a soap opera,
Speaker 1: But what's really interesting is we're getting a part of
Speaker 1: the story. This woman who was so dependent on her husband,
Speaker 1: has young children, her heart is broken, she's being cheated on.
Speaker 1: She catches her husband in the act and then is
Speaker 1: left by herself, and then she built, she makes a restaurant. Right,
Speaker 1: she starts to get on her feet. We're seeing her
Speaker 1: gather the piece together. She's getting her life, guys, she's
Speaker 1: becoming a strong independent woman. And then this douchebag who
Speaker 1: trade her and harassed someone else doesn't seem like such
Speaker 1: a such a catch, is dragged back into her life,
Speaker 1: right right, and.
Speaker 2: So like, Yes, I will also admit that this totally
Speaker 2: amazes me that they that they take these guys back
Speaker 2: who are app so many of them are absolute jerks.
Speaker 2: It's somewhat astounding. I think a lot of it has
Speaker 2: to do with the nature of marriage and the place
Speaker 2: of women in society at that time. Certainly women worked,
Speaker 2: they worked in sweat shops, but a so called glass
Speaker 2: ceiling then was a lot lower, and it wasn't really glass,
Speaker 2: it was like brick. Women were absolutely limited as to
Speaker 2: what they could do. And obviously, when you have kids,
Speaker 2: even if both the men and the woman have to work,
Speaker 2: to have two incomes is important, you know, especially as
Speaker 2: the kids get older and you don't have to care
Speaker 2: for them as much. It's in a way, it's kind
Speaker 2: of tragic how women were forced to be so reliant
Speaker 2: on men. As you say, the fact that this woman,
Speaker 2: I'm sure she wasn't the first to do it, but
Speaker 2: that she, you know, came up with this idea of
Speaker 2: running a cheap apartment in the neighborhood that had the
Speaker 2: most Jews in the area and lots of workers people
Speaker 2: who needed to eat lunch, especially a kosher lunch, because
Speaker 2: not all restaurants were there weren't There were certainly kosher restaurants,
Speaker 2: but you wanted to say, and also, it's like a home
Speaker 2: cooked meal. So if she's a good cook, that's that
Speaker 2: could be better than a restaurant, and that could be
Speaker 2: really appealing to people who have are having a miserable
Speaker 2: day in a sweatshop and you know, want to take
Speaker 2: a break to eat, you know, a really hearty lunch
Speaker 2: cooked by you know, a y the shimama. So that's
Speaker 2: you know, I thought it was a really incredibly clever idea,
Speaker 2: and really and really it was something that I hadn't
Speaker 2: really considered before I saw this card. And that's what's
Speaker 2: great about these files is that they have all these
Speaker 2: little inchif gis, all these like kind of little items
Speaker 2: in them that that you know, you don't find in
Speaker 2: normal historical records, so it allows you extrapolate on historical
Speaker 2: phenomena like women in society and how do they handle
Speaker 2: a situation like this, and it's and this is sort
Speaker 2: of a great great example of that of that type
Speaker 2: of scenario.
Speaker 1: Do you ever or has anyone attempted to try to
Speaker 1: get the continuation of stories that end where the file ends?
Speaker 2: So it's the I think the only way to do
Speaker 2: that is to find the families because once the once
Speaker 2: the once the case files end, that's it.
Speaker 1: No more data, right.
Speaker 2: They don't they don't continue, there's no research, there's nothing
Speaker 2: new either the husband reconciles, he doesn't reconcile. Sometimes there
Speaker 2: are cases where there are like there are guys who
Speaker 2: constantly reappear. There are people sometimes who have who have
Speaker 2: they've married multiple times, and the same woman multiple times.
Speaker 2: And so you know, you see on the application the
Speaker 2: first time the woman comes to the office and then
Speaker 2: the second time. It could there could be like months
Speaker 2: or years in between the times that she shows up
Speaker 2: to file a new case of abandon it.
Speaker 1: What other stories can you tell? I really like the stories.
Speaker 2: There are, I mean it's there. They're like there are
Speaker 2: thousands of now and it's this was a very complete one,
Speaker 2: like this is a very complete one, and this is
Speaker 2: this is one that I that I tell a lot,
Speaker 2: and I tell it because it's a rich story. There
Speaker 2: are other stories where well, they all sort of follow
Speaker 2: a similar path. Where an leaves, usually a woman with children,
Speaker 2: She goes and files an application. They initiated an investigation.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they find the guy living in the tenement building
Speaker 2: next door. Sometimes they don't find the guy at all.
Speaker 2: You know, there was one one of the cases that
Speaker 2: we featured in the exhibit was a story of a
Speaker 2: man who abandoned his wife and never reappeared. And you
Speaker 2: even have letters in the file from the man's mother
Speaker 2: begging him to come back to his wife, and he
Speaker 2: doesn't even respond to his own mother. So there are
Speaker 2: you know, there are some cases where the guys are nice.
Speaker 2: You also have you also have files where there are
Speaker 2: like receipts for for that they're sending into the National
Speaker 2: Desertion Bureau. The men are sending the National Bark to
Speaker 2: show that they're giving their wives money, fives and children money.
Speaker 2: And sometimes there are also letters you know, I wasn't
Speaker 2: able to pay this week because I'm out of money.
Speaker 2: It's really there are thousands, thousands of files of like
Speaker 2: terribly tragic stories. Yeah, because most of these people are
Speaker 2: very poor. They can't you know, they can't support these families.
Speaker 2: And then you have these sort of lithario's who just
Speaker 2: ay marry multiple women, they do all kinds of all
Speaker 2: kinds of terrible things. And so one of the things
Speaker 2: that was also interesting about this is finding stories in
Speaker 2: the papers. I mentioned before. The newspapers become a really
Speaker 2: important component of this story because not only because they,
Speaker 2: you know, have this gallery of missing husbands that everybody
Speaker 2: reads and everyone wants to, you know, find someone in
Speaker 2: and it's often one of the ways that that that
Speaker 2: that the manner are discovered, but the papers also have
Speaker 2: some really really interesting stories about families like this. And
Speaker 2: I have a couple here if I can read them,
Speaker 2: if you think it'd be interesting. Here's a story from
Speaker 2: from the four verts from to nineteen thirteen that readis
Speaker 2: follows cigar maker Charles Weiss doesn't look like much, but
Speaker 2: he apparently knows how to treat the ladies. And you know,
Speaker 2: it's funny because the Yiddish press like often wrote about
Speaker 2: things like this, like with tongue in cheek. They write
Speaker 2: about it with like snark. They it's you know, some
Speaker 2: of the stories are written in a really kind of,
Speaker 2: you know, funny and ironic way.
Speaker 1: They probably have a huge readership that's looking to do
Speaker 1: for these people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you know, the stories are incredible. I'll just
Speaker 2: start from the beginning again. So cigar maker Charles Weiss
Speaker 2: doesn't look like much, but he apparently knows how to
Speaker 2: treat the ladies. Arrested last week for bigamy, he denied everything,
Speaker 2: but when he showed up in court to find his
Speaker 2: three wives chatting amongst themselves, he knew he'd been caught.
Speaker 2: Wife number one, Annie Heller married wife married Weiss three
Speaker 2: years ago, but knew him by the name Martin Yambach.
Speaker 2: The couple has one child together. Wife number two, Lena Weissberger,
Speaker 2: told the court that she met Charles six months ago
Speaker 2: and it was introduced to him with his real name,
Speaker 2: but also as a widower with three children who she
Speaker 2: has been caring for. This is Weis's number three. The
Speaker 2: former Ida Krantz carried a baby that it turned out
Speaker 2: belonged to wife number two. She was married to wife
Speaker 2: Weiss just two months ago, and said that after he
Speaker 2: sold all her jewelry to fix up the house, he
Speaker 2: began disappearing. Number three became suspicious and followed Weiss to
Speaker 2: a house in West Harlem, where she discovered that he
Speaker 2: was living with Number two. When the judge asked Weiss
Speaker 2: what he had to say, all he could do was mutter,
Speaker 2: I'm guilty. Wow, so much for it up right, I know,
Speaker 2: I know, so it's it's really it's amazing. So here
Speaker 2: I'll read another one. This one's from nineteen fifteen. It
Speaker 2: says Morris Bloomberg, an elderly jew with a long beard
Speaker 2: and a regular in the Forvarts Gallery of Missing Husband's column,
Speaker 2: has left his wife again and was in court to
Speaker 2: explain why. Bloomberg was married eighteen years ago and has
Speaker 2: disappeared a number of times. The last time was seven
Speaker 2: years ago, and when he was caught, he was arrested.
Speaker 2: Although he doesn't deny running away this time, he claims
Speaker 2: it's his wife's fault and offered ten reasons as to
Speaker 2: why Number one she beats him. Number two she wouldn't
Speaker 2: let him read the Sunday paper. Number three she made
Speaker 2: him do his own laundry. Number four, she stole money
Speaker 2: from him. Number five, she broke his glasses. Number six,
Speaker 2: she wouldn't let him attend to his business. Number seven,
Speaker 2: she wouldn't do his laundry. I would say, laundry's in
Speaker 2: there twice so important. It's a big issue, a big issue, right.
Speaker 2: Number eight, she demanded the he washed the windows. Number nine,
Speaker 2: she didn't love him. Number ten her mother always stuck
Speaker 2: her nose in their business. The case is expected to
Speaker 2: go to the jury today.
Speaker 3: It's like, and all his reasons are equally No, obviously,
Speaker 3: but it's but but it's funny that this guy shows
Speaker 3: up in court with a list of reasons, thinking, oh, well.
Speaker 2: This is this is going to make my case for me.
Speaker 2: It's you know, these people they often worn't the most
Speaker 2: brilliant of folks. It's it's you know, it's just the
Speaker 2: reality of how that works.
Speaker 1: He could have he could he could have bothered to
Speaker 1: notice the duplicate on the laundry. But yeah, go ahead,
Speaker 1: what were you going to say?
Speaker 2: No? No? So so, you know, the papers are just
Speaker 2: full of stories like this, and you know, from a
Speaker 2: historian's perspective, they're just this incredibly fascinating perspective into you know,
Speaker 2: the personal lives of Jewish immigrants, and it's something you
Speaker 2: don't really get anywhere else. I mean, certainly, you know,
Speaker 2: writers and novelists have written, you know, things like this.
Speaker 2: I mean, in in the book I published a number
Speaker 2: of years ago, Bad Rabbi, I have a chapter from
Speaker 2: it's about the Warsaw Rabbinical Court. And that was also
Speaker 2: a common, commonly featured thing in the Yiddish press and Poland,
Speaker 2: the cases of the rabbinical court, and especially divorce cases.
Speaker 2: And they were so popular that there was even a
Speaker 2: stage play, a Yiddish stage play made about the based
Speaker 2: in about the about the rabbinical about the divorce cases
Speaker 2: in the rabbinical court, because they were just such rich
Speaker 2: stories of you know, they were often violent. You know,
Speaker 2: there's lots of streaming and yelling. They were very very dramatic,
Speaker 2: and so it's just another instance of how, you know,
Speaker 2: how the press figures into the into the lives of
Speaker 2: these of these people and sort of brings it to
Speaker 2: life for you know, for a different audience. Obviously, it's
Speaker 2: you know, there are the purpose of the press the
Speaker 2: time was to bring it to life for a contempt
Speaker 2: very audience. You know. For me, it's like I was saying,
Speaker 2: how about angefell in a schmald school, which is sort
Speaker 2: of untranslatable, but it's like I fell into this incredibly rich, juicy,
Speaker 2: you know, topic that is historically fascinating and dramatic and
Speaker 2: compelling and also gives insight into the lives of common people, which,
Speaker 2: like I said, is something you just don't you don't
Speaker 2: really get many other places.
Speaker 1: Yeah, speaking of like juicy and dramatic, something that I
Speaker 1: am wondering about. Maybe this is just an information bias.
Speaker 1: In stories about immigrants in the Lower east Side, there
Speaker 1: seems to be a lot of philandering. I don't know,
Speaker 1: this is probably an information bias, but I'm just wondering.
Speaker 1: A thought in my mind is if the upheaval of
Speaker 1: relocating with the family makes you question everything and causes
Speaker 1: maybe more of that kind of sexual energy.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know if it causes sexual energy.
Speaker 3: Thinking partnerships more like Yeah, I mean, look, yes, I
Speaker 3: think that you know, this was a massive social and
Speaker 3: cultural upheaval.
Speaker 2: You're in an entirely new place. You are also to
Speaker 2: the typical Lower east Side or New York City tenement
Speaker 2: apartment was I think three hundred square feet. The average
Speaker 2: family had six kids. And that's cramped. You know, that's
Speaker 2: that's not you know, even if you like it, that
Speaker 2: people you're there all the time. It's like you can't move,
Speaker 2: you can't turn around without someone being there. That that's
Speaker 2: a hard way to live. And so, you know, and
Speaker 2: being men, they see an opportunity and they take it,
Speaker 2: and it's and then the unfortunate aspect is that in
Speaker 2: many cases it broke up families and did damage. So
Speaker 2: it's you know, obviously, the Jewish community recognized this and
Speaker 2: as a result created the National Resertion Bureau in order
Speaker 2: to deal with it. Obviously by the and also interesting
Speaker 2: that I should also add that that they the National
Speaker 2: Ressertion Bureau was open to anyone. They didn't you know,
Speaker 2: you didn't have to be Jewish to use it. But
Speaker 2: because it was a Jewish organization funded by the Jewish community,
Speaker 2: at least up through the nineteen thirties, the vast majority
Speaker 2: of clients are Jews. By the no reason. When Jews
Speaker 2: begin to enter the middle classes in much larger numbers,
Speaker 2: that begins to change. And so from nineteen sties through
Speaker 2: and they function until the nineteen sixties. You know, you
Speaker 2: just see all kinds of different people, you know, entering
Speaker 2: into the files. You still, you know, wind up with
Speaker 2: Jews during these times, but you know, they're no longer,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't think they're they're a majority any longer,
Speaker 2: because once you're in the middle class, you know, it's
Speaker 2: no longer you know, you have the where the financial
Speaker 2: wherewithal to actually pay for a divorce. And in fact,
Speaker 2: you know, in the early twentieth century, family abandonment was
Speaker 2: often called poor divorce. You know, this is you know,
Speaker 2: getting it, hiring a lawyer, getting a divorce that costs money.
Speaker 2: And Jews have to do it twice. They they have to,
Speaker 2: you know, they have to you know, if they got
Speaker 2: married civilly, they have to get a civil divorce, and
Speaker 2: they also have to get a get you know, which
Speaker 2: also costs money. And so it's you know, they you know,
Speaker 2: by abandonment, they avoided all of this and you know,
Speaker 2: and just disappeared. But like I said, when you get
Speaker 2: to Jews becoming middle class, they they handle it, you know,
Speaker 2: in the appropriate fashion. They go to a lawyer, they
Speaker 2: get a divorce.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I imagine also that at the time let's say
Speaker 1: the early years, child support was a thing. Was it
Speaker 1: in a divorce?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it was. I mean, you know, one of
Speaker 2: the outcomes of now the National Desertion Bureaus activities was
Speaker 2: the development of something called family Court where these cases
Speaker 2: often appeared. And the people and Family Court works hand
Speaker 2: in hand with the National Desertion Bureau in cases where
Speaker 2: they do where where couples do want to get divorced.
Speaker 2: If a couple wants to divorce, the National Desertion Beer
Speaker 2: will help them do it. And one of the interesting
Speaker 2: aspects of this is, you know, earlier on I mentioned
Speaker 2: the fact that you know, this problem of family abandonment
Speaker 2: was you know, it's really a problem of poverty. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a family, it's a problem of social you know
Speaker 2: of of you know, finances, and it affected Italian and
Speaker 2: Irish immigrants in the same ways that it affected Jews.
Speaker 2: But because most Italians and uh uh and Irish or Catholic,
Speaker 2: they can't get divorced, they begin church. The church handles
Speaker 2: this problem for them, but the church won't allow them
Speaker 2: to get to get divorced, so they force you know,
Speaker 2: marriages that are bad marriages to stay together because that's
Speaker 2: considered a holy union, and so to a certain degree,
Speaker 2: for Jews, they're in a much better situation because you know,
Speaker 2: according to their tradition, they are able to get divorced,
Speaker 2: you know, especially in situations where where the marriage is Yeah.
Speaker 1: Interesting last question. The exhibit. The EVO exhibit obviously popularized
Speaker 1: this whole fascinating saga. Was there at any point in
Speaker 1: your working on this project that you heard from someone
Speaker 1: who is a descendant from anyone in this story?
Speaker 2: No, but I had a lot of people contact me
Speaker 2: asking if they were because one of the things that
Speaker 2: EVO has as partner's archives is a card catalog that
Speaker 2: belonged to the National Desertion Bureau. So if you had
Speaker 2: a case file with the National Desertion Bureau and they
Speaker 2: needed to access your file, they had a special card
Speaker 2: catalog like in the library, where you'd like three by
Speaker 2: five cards with the basic information about the family. So
Speaker 2: people always used to ask me if I could check
Speaker 2: the card catalog to find their great grandfather to see
Speaker 2: if they were in there. And I don't really find anything,
Speaker 2: but one time there's a person in there's a person
Speaker 2: in Evo's orbit it who does a lot of EVO
Speaker 2: activities who mentioned that her I think her grandfather had
Speaker 2: abandoned their family, and we looked it up and in fact,
Speaker 2: her grandfather had a file. Wow, there are cases like this.
Speaker 2: And also what interesting is the Jewish Board put that
Speaker 2: card catalog online and so you can actually look it
Speaker 2: up online to see if you had a relative in this.
Speaker 2: And then if you, in fact you do, you note
Speaker 2: the case number on the card and you come to
Speaker 2: EVO and you order the file. And I think it
Speaker 2: takes a day to a day or two to get
Speaker 2: the actual file, but you can, you know, you can
Speaker 2: look at it. In addition, someone from the genealogical organization
Speaker 2: Jewish Gen created a database of apparently all of the
Speaker 2: men in the gallery of missing husbands. So if you
Speaker 2: suspect that you had a philandering zeti for but groizeated,
Speaker 2: you can you can go to Jewish Gen and look
Speaker 2: this up. If you find something, it's likely that the
Speaker 2: National Assertion File National Assertion Bureau ful. Wow, fascinating.
Speaker 1: Is the exhibit still up?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: No, sorry, the exhibit had went down about a year ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought so.
Speaker 2: I remember it was topic. You know, people still talk
Speaker 2: about a lot.
Speaker 1: How can people learn more about it or maybe learn
Speaker 1: more about your work.
Speaker 2: If they're intrigued, well they could, you know, look at
Speaker 2: Evo's website evo dot org that has all of our
Speaker 2: you know, events and exhibits and classes and you know,
Speaker 2: various other online projects as part of the website. I mean,
Speaker 2: EVO has something like twenty four million documents and artifacts
Speaker 2: that relate to mostly Ashkenazi jew and sort of Eastern
Speaker 2: European Jewish life. But it's we have a lot of
Speaker 2: other things as well. You know, we have a library
Speaker 2: of about you know, between three and four hundred thousand volumes,
Speaker 2: lots of Arabinic material, you know, the archives, and you know,
Speaker 2: the the archives they're just so rich. It's just there's
Speaker 2: so many different things, ranging from you know, the archives
Speaker 2: of Yiddish writers and artists to Jewish organizations to you know,
Speaker 2: the Vadharabonum in Vilna. I mean, it's like there's there's
Speaker 2: you know, Yiddish school systems in Poland between the wars.
Speaker 2: It's uh, it's such a great, great collection and it's
Speaker 2: open to the public, so you can just you know,
Speaker 2: come here and find some fascinating topic to work on
Speaker 2: and research and anything anything that interests you and beautiful now. Also,
Speaker 2: you know, if people want to learn more about the
Speaker 2: National Resertion beheer about, you know, how it functioned and
Speaker 2: what it did, they could look up Anti Egro's book.
Speaker 2: I want to say. It's like, oh, thank it, I'll
Speaker 2: link it.
Speaker 1: You can look it in that in the video description. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll just find it in a link. It great. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much, Eddie. I really really enjoyed learning from it.
Speaker 2: I hope it wasn't boring boring? How going to be boring?
Speaker 1: I go to be boring? I feel like we could
Speaker 1: we could be talking about the stories that are found.
Speaker 1: I personally, as someone who's interested in culture, have always
Speaker 1: been fascinated by ordinary people's lives. It's just something that
Speaker 1: really interests me.
Speaker 2: And of course, look, Mary, people are incredibly fascinating. You
Speaker 2: don't have to exactly be or have you know, been,
Speaker 2: you know, wildly successful in something, or a singer or
Speaker 2: a writer or whatever. People are. People are just interesting exactly.
Speaker 2: You know, you know, whoever you're sitting next to on
Speaker 2: the boss or on the subway could be, you know,
Speaker 2: someone who's got this really compelling, dramatic story, and you
Speaker 2: know obviously you don't want to pry, but I'm time
Speaker 2: worth it. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I love people watching, but sometimes the only the only
Speaker 1: way to really get to these ordinary people's stories is
Speaker 1: like historical. Yeah, piecing together what we what we can find. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you again so much. I really appreciate it. I'm
Speaker 1: going to link your book bad Rabbi and also the
Speaker 1: EVO website in the video description, and also thank you
Speaker 1: to the viewers and the podcast listener right.
Speaker 2: Thanks to thanks to any everyone who might watch this