Incubating Petaluma history
The history of Petaluma is rich and deep, and sometimes dark. Again, I pick but one tile from the mosaic and try to do it justice. To do so I stand on the shoulders of giants: check out John Patrick Sheehy’s “Petaluma Historian” blog for dozens of essential Petaluma stories, and check out Kenneth Kann’s “Comrades and Chicken Ranchers” for an in-depth history of the tale I now relate.
You know that Petaluma was for decades “The Egg Basket of The World”, driven by Lyman Bice’s market-disrupting introduction of the first commercial incubator, sold by the Petaluma Incubator Company, that brought worldwide renown and generational wealth to Petaluma. Chicken farmers set up shop in clusters in and around Petaluma. One of these cluster was around 120 Jewish immigrant families from Eastern Europe. The leading edge of this wave arrived in Petaluma after World War One, and by 1925 there was a thriving community, and the Jewish Community Center (now the B’Nai Israel Jewish Center) opened on Western Avenue.
Compared to the life they had escaped in Europe, Petaluma was glorious: a chance to raise chickens and families in peace and prosperity. Most of the Petaluma Jews were socialist, and (as all successful immigrant communities do) they pooled their resources accordingly in a kibbutz in all but name. Within the socialist community were many different flavors: Communists, Labor Zionists, social Democratic Arbeter Ringers, anarchists, Yiddishists and Hebraicists. This was an intellectual community who had chosen an agricultural life for ideological reasons as well as practical ones.
However, relations with their fellow Petalumans were not exactly warm: Petaluma was, like most of America at the time, not exactly friendly to deviations from the white protestant norm, and prone to occasionally vigorous vigilante activity to enforce those norms. In 1935, Sol Nitzberg, a fiery radical from the 1905 Russian Revolution (think Perchik from “Fiddler on the Roof”), was thought to be organizing the Okie apple pickers, and rewarded with an old school tarring and feathering.
Relations within the Jewish community grew fractious as well: a division developed between the linke (roughly, “left”), who tended Communist and supported Stalin, and the rekhte, who favored Zionism. This culminated with the rekhte expelling the linke organizations from the Community Center, driven by the fear that Joe McCarthy and his followers would label the entire Jewish community of Petaluma as Communist sympathizers. This was not a form of paranoia: the FBI had been questioning people in Petaluma about linke activities, such as their putting on Yiddish concerts with singer Paul Robeson in support of the Rosenbergs, then on death row after conviction for espionage.
There is no ending to this story. The descendants of these families are still here in Petaluma, an integral part of the community. The political and philosophical debates rage on, and I am fairly sure a good number of that community has a bone to pick with me for getting my heroes and villains wrong, or for missing important facts. I readily admit my guilt and plead my inexperience. This is an incredible story, and I am pretty sure I have barely scratched the surface.
