Shtetls in Maine
In the aftermath of a catastrophe, how does a place hold onto the memory of what was lost? This question has been on my mind since my travels in Romania, during which time I wrote for this newsletter about the small, underground museum of Jews in Cluj-Napoca, and the impossibility of finding any evidence of Jewish history outside of a cemetery. Before that, I wrote about haunting and prisons in LA, all of the subtle ways that we see and experience both historical and ongoing violence in Downtown.
For the last month or so, I have been traveling in Massachusetts and Maine, where I’ve been lucky to explore some of New England’s small local museums. This is a culture that, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t have in California in the small way--little buildings, someone’s house or a synagogue or even a retired marine hospital, will become a museum open to the public that invites visitors to learn about the history of a place. Recently I went to the Maine Jewish Museum in Portland, and through a funny set of happy circumstances, I spent the last four days staffing the Museum Café at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. These are both places where I have some connection, and have visited before, but visits to the museums enhanced my experience impressively, showing me pieces of the history that I had been looking for, as well as things I had not been aware of at all.
I did not expect to learn about Jewish history in Maine. My family there is not Jewish, but when I read Yiddish literature that describes devastating winters in Eastern Europe as endless miles covered in white, tundra-like nothingness, I am always reminded of how my mother describes her rural childhood in Maine. Perhaps, then, it makes sense that Jews have settled in Maine, albeit in small numbers, since the large waves of immigration in the late 19th century brought Jews to North America. According to the museum, some Jews who arrived in major port cities like Boston or New York fled urban tenements for Maine, where the climate and pace of life was more similar to the shtetlekh they hailed from. Some of them were peddlers, pictured in the museum with horse-drawn carriages full of goods for sale. Other pictures show these early immigrants assembled into minyanim in small town-cities like Bangor and Bath, and even pictures of Yiddish theatre groups that made visits to Maine while on tour. In the 20th century, Holocaust survivors also arrived in Maine, and many Jewish summer camps (as well as non-Jewish summer camps) were established in the beautiful landscape, serene and verdant and full of lakes, as if it was made for this purpose.
The Martha’s Vineyard Museum, similarly a gem of a place, was a relief for me to find. This summer was my first time travelling to Massachusetts since reading Moby Dick, a book which changed my life and, I now realize, I must discuss with reference to Judaism in a future Der Nister newsletter. Ever since reading Melville I have been obsessed with whaling and leviathans. Unironically--really, I say this without a touch of irony--I was looking for evidence of whales in Martha’s Vineyard the same way I looked for evidence of Jews in Eastern Europe. The giant sea creatures also suffered a genocide, in a disastrous economy that plotted the future of Western civilization at the cost of the civilization of whales. Whaling ships and the sailors that boarded them became the subject of Moby Dick, but they were also a foundational economy in the region, generating wealth and infrastructure that established many towns and cities in Massachusetts. Yet, as one walks around coastal New England, very similarly to my time in Transylvania, there is essentially no evidence of the violent genocidal history. I wanted to see monuments to whales on Martha’s Vineyard, or even to the sailors that hunted them, driven to take up the brutal violence of the whaling profession by circumstance and a desire for adventure. The island itself was their grave, but there is no evidence of this; the only cetological imagery one sees in the towns are the Vineyard Vines storefronts.
The Martha’s Vineyard Museum, located in the building of the former Marine Hospital that used treat injured sailors, seeks to correct such unfortunate effacement of history. Inside its doors one can find the giant lantern that illuminated the Gay Head lighthouse (referenced in Moby Dick,) as well as scrimshaws, images carved into whalebones by sailors as a pastime. One of the scrimshaws was even owned by Melville, and a later artist engraved the initials “H M” into the sky in the picture. I was so pleased, truly overjoyed, to see a single object connected to this history and the legends about it I’ve heard.
I also visited the Sailors’ Burying Grounds on Martha’s Vineyard. I realized that many of the buried sailors had died or been treated at the Marine Hospital, before that building became the museum. A plaque designates the place, but otherwise, it would be impossible to know anyone was buried there or anything particular had happened at all. The sailors were buried at first with wooden markers instead of tombstones, and the wooden markers decayed quickly. Now, the graves are marked by small concrete blocks with numbers made out of curved wire, with a corresponding name given for each number on the plaque--although some of them, who washed ashore, were buried and never identified.
What is haunting? Where is the presence of people lost and forgotten, who died in catastrophic circumstances that the present world seems committed to forget? What can a museum do to rectify forgetfulness?
