"There Are No Cultural Islands like Ceshinsky's": Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore and Intellectual Space in Chicago, 1922–1966

Abstract

"There Are No Cultural Islands like Ceshinsky's"Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore and Intellectual Space in Chicago, 1922–1966 Erin Faigin (bio) In 1981, a local Chicago television station asked Saul Bellow to lead a walking tour through Humboldt Park, his childhood home. Although Bellow was born in Quebec, he moved with his family to Chicago in 1924 when he was nine years old. The Bellows settled in Humboldt Park, a neighborhood on the northwest side of the city. Originally settled by Germans and Scandinavians, by the 1920s Humboldt Park was home to a diverse mix of European immigrants, among them Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews. The Bellows lived on Cortez Street, just south of the intersection of Division and Damen. Walking west on Division from Damen in the 1920s, one might pass by a meeting of the Zionist Organization of America at Budapest Hall or a staging of a Yiddish play at the Biltmore Theatre.1 At the intersection of Division and Campbell, one could catch a streetcar headed downtown, but for most Humboldt Park residents there was no need. Between California and Damen, they shopped at Jewish-owned bakeries and groceries, were styled in Jewish-owned shoe stores and photo studios, visited Jewish dentists and doctors, called on Jewish exterminators and contractors, and sought counsel from Jewish undertakers in times of grief.2 Yet, for Bellow and his friends, the most important institution on Division Street was Moshe Ceshinsky's bookstore, located just east of California Street. Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore offered more than the opportunity to exchange cash for goods; the space itself facilitated the exchange of ideas. Bellow would later reminisce: [End Page 15] [My] friends and I are trying to locate Ceshinsky's little island of culture. In the days of our youth our neighborhood didn't look very different from similar districts in Manchester or St. Etienne, but it is undoubtedly worse now. There are no cultural islands like Ceshinsky's. He may not have been aware that he was selling inflammatory books—Germinal, The Flowers of Evil, Man's Fate, the works of Marx and Engels—to high-school students. To him all books were precious.3 At Ceshinsky's, fathers smoked cigars and debated politics; landsmanshaftn4 held meetings; Yiddish poets perfected manuscripts; leftists could buy the Communist Daily Worker or the Trotskyist New International; Jews purchased ritual objects imported from Israel. Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore was a cultural island for Jewish immigrants in the sea of change that was their new home, Chicago. Before Ceshinsky opened his own bookstore, he worked as a traveling salesman for Yiddish publishing houses and newspapers.5 He was introduced to America by way of rail, both its dispersion and its connection. Upon settling in Chicago in 1922, he promptly opened his own bookstore, transitioning from itinerant salesman to neighborhood businessman. In opening a storefront on Division Street, Ceshinsky claimed a stake for himself and for Yiddish literature in Humboldt Park. Although his business was vulnerable to the fluctuations of the market, he was no longer subject to the vagaries of being a mobile salesman. Yet, through his business, Ceshinsky continued to use books as mobile manifestations of a Yiddish public sphere disrupted and reconfigured by migration. As Derek Penslar argues, the Jewish press represents a microcosm of the Jewish public sphere, the collectivity of private Jewish individuals engaged in the creation of public discourse.6 Tony Michels describes the emergence of a "Yiddish-speaking, working-class version of Habermas' public sphere" in late nineteenth-century New York and identifies the Yiddish socialist press as its central institution.7 Over the course of the early twentieth century, the Yiddish public sphere described by Michels expanded in geographical and political scope. No longer centered on the Lower East Side, the Yiddish public sphere in which Ceshinsky participated was polycentric, broadly leftist, and economically diverse. When he became a publisher in the 1930s, Ceshinsky took a role in shaping the geographic boundaries and cultural content of that Yiddish public sphere. The publications produced by his publishing house, [End Page 16] Ceshinsky Farlag, described a world where Yiddish was a multigenerational, global, thriving language.8 Ceshinsky Farlag published Zishe...