The Bookworm: Postville

Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America by Stephen G. Bloom. 384 pages. Harcourt, Inc. 2000.

Postville is no longer insulated or singular. As our nation’s cultural contours continue to change, Postville has become a social experiment challenging the theory that if people of different cultures live together, they ought to get along. Because of the Hasidim, Postville has finally joined modern American. Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe Postville is out front of where the rest of America is eventually headed.

Postville came out when I was a senior in high school, but I remember it for the buzz it was still generating when I started journalism classes at the UI in the fall of 2001.

Everyone was talking about it. My journalism instructors, my editors and fellow reporters at The Daily Iowan, and all the literati in IC. Postville. Postville. Postville. Stephen Bloom, a UI journalism professor, had been elevated to god status at the J school and in the writing community. However, despite all the praise and attention it received locally, I didn’t get around to reading it until now. (As required of me as a writer and expatriate Iowan, I bought Postville at Prairie Lights when I was back in Iowa City in July.) I finished it this morning at the Toyota dealership in Huntington Beach, waiting for the 5,000-mile maintenance to be done on my car.

Here’s my opinion in a nutshell (or nutgraph): Postville is top-notch investigative/new journalism and a great read. As a writer and closet journalist, I found it engaging and interesting. Postville is well-written and well-researched, and definitely lived up to the hype, far surpassing my expectations.

Postville is not only an in-depth profile of the small town of Postville, Iowa and the clash of cultures that has been ongoing since the late-‘80s, but also a man’s search for kinship and identity in an unfamiliar land where he has few cultural and religious kinfolk.

In 1987, Aaron Rubashkin, a kosher butcher in the ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn, opened a kosher slaughterhouse, Agriprocessors, in Postville, bringing to the area an economic boost during hard times. But new jobs weren’t the only thing that came. New neighbors, Hasidic Jews with a completely alien religion and lifestyle, moved next door to the small town, mostly Lutheran, Iowans, who couldn’t make heads or tails of the newcomers. What followed has been the transformation of a sleepy, white, insular agricultural town into a multicultural melting pot simmering with cross-ethnic frustration.

Shamefully, I can’t recall exactly why Bloom became so engrossed in the situation in Postville, but I do know that, at first, he was interested in the Hasidim, wanting to connect to fellow Jews and the customs and food he grew up with on the east coast. When it comes to religion, Christianity, especially Protestantism, reigns in Iowa; there are Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims, but they are found in small pockets in the bigger cities. Bloom moved to Iowa City from San Francisco to become a teacher at the UI, and life in Iowa was completely different than the urban experience he was accustomed to. He was seeking guidance from others like him who transplanted themselves from larger metropolitan areas, but the Hasidim wanted only to proselytize him. However, that didn’t detour Bloom, who wanted to learn more about the community and how the locals and Jews interacted.

The book is well framed by the municipal referendum to annex the slaughterhouse, bringing it inside city jurisdiction; the first and last chapters take place on election day. In between, Bloom examines the situation from both sides, providing balanced viewpoints from the Hasidim and locals. He gets the Postville natives to open up and is allowed inside the world of the Hasidim as they try to reform his life and lax religious practices (Bloom is what is described as a Reform Jew, who the Hasidim and other orthodox Jews believe has assimilated to gentile culture and needs to be brought back to the faith). Although he lets his opinion be known at the end, I think Bloom was unbiased and fair in his presentation.

Before his first visits to Postville, though, Bloom spent a couple years in Iowa City. He details his process of getting settled and familiarizing himself with IC and the predominantly Christian Hawkeye state, writing about many things I’m familiar with. It was trippy to read about Whitey’s Ice Cream (yes, I’ve always thought the name was weird) and other IC restaurants, Summit Street, the school his son attended (Longfellow), and Eastern Iowa landmarks like the giant strawberry in Strawberry Point. He even mentioned my high school French teacher and her husband, though not by name. His descriptions of the landscape and the things he began to love about the Midwest made me homesick.

Ironically, at the same time I’m reading Postville, I’m reading about the hearings on fraud charges brought against Agriprocessors and the man who ran the daily operations, Sholom Rubashin, the son of Aaron. According to the DMR coverage (headed by Grant Schulte, an IC native and buddy of mine), Sholom “faces a maximum 1,280-year sentence if convicted on all financial fraud charges. The allegations include bank, mail and wire fraud, money laundering and ignoring an order to pay cattle providers in the time mandated by law.” Agriprocessors was also the site of the largest single-site crackdown on illegal workers in the US; 389 workers, about one-third of the company’s workforce, were detained when federal immigration agents raided the plant on May 12, 2008.

While Bloom’s focus was on the townspeople, he wrote a little regarding the inner workings of the plant, describing the slaughtering and koshering process. Needless to say, reading those scenes bolstered my vegetarian life choice. I knew the meat industry was massively productive, but this was the first time I’ve seen the mind numbing numbers. On a tour of the killfloor, Bloom is taken to the chicken kill:

Four rabbis, their beards confined by bluish, mesh nets, sat side by side, wearing white coats and goggles. Each held a small razor in his right hand, slitting the necks of chickens, 2,850 per hour. It was a sight — a flurry of squawking chickens all on death row. The neck of each chicken was forced into a metal brace, and as the cut-throat chickens moved past the rabbis’ workstation, they still fluttered and bristled, advancing toward the next workstation, where feathers were removed in a chemical bath. The speed was amazing, 50 birds per minute.

Insane. I can’t locate the beef output numbers but they’re equally boggling. And this was over a decade ago; the operation has only gotten bigger since.

Interesting tidbit: the photo on the cover, of the Jewish man walking past the bench of farm geezers is not a photo at all. It’s a montage made from two different pictures. It looked a little funny to me, but I didn’t learn it was two distinct images combined until I pealed off the Prairie Lights stocking sticker to reveal the credits.

On a side note, I invited Bloom to be my friend when I first got a Facebook account. I’ve never met him, and never had him as a professor, but I heard he’s a cool guy. He accepted my request, which confirmed his coolness. Though, like most Facebook friends, he was just a picture and name, and after a few months I removed him from my friends list.

New words I learned: All definitions courtesy of my MacBook dictionary. Plat: “a plot of land.” Viscera: “the internal organs in the main cavities of the body, esp. those in the abdomen, e.g., the intestines.” Minyan: “a quorum of ten men (or in some synagogues, men and women) over the age of 13 required for traditional Jewish public worship.” Proselytize: “convert or attempt to convert (someone) from one religion, belief, or opinion to another.” Parsimony: “extreme unwillingness to spend money or use resources.” Klatch: “a social gathering, esp. for coffee and conversation.” Abattoir: “a slaughterhouse.” Afterglow: “light or radiance remaining in the sky after the sun has set,” or “good feelings remaining after a pleasurable or successful experience.” Plexus: “an intricate network or weblike formation.” Riposte: “a quick clever reply to an insult or criticism.” Aplomb: “self-confidence or assurance, esp. when in a demanding situation.” Phylactery: “a small leather box containing Hebrew texts on vellum, worn by Jewish men at morning prayer as a reminder to keep the law.”