Oh. Canada.
My great-grandparents needed to escape. Saskatchewan sounded nice.
In the tale of modern North America, the East was for recreating the old, the West was for creating the new, but the Plains just kicked your ass. Even the desert was more inviting than this. The desert calls to the music makers and dreamers of dreams, swimming pools, and movie stars. When the pioneers of yore offered their identities to the desert, it filled the void with romance. You went to the prairies, on the other hand, if you were trying to prove yourself, work hard. On the Prairie, you sacrificed your identity not for romance but for purpose. On the Prairie, pioneering wasn’t a path, the temporary road to eventual success, it was a lifestyle; identity was at one with the land.
At the turn of the last century, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier declared that the 20th century belonged to Canada. All across the cities of Europe, the Canadian prairies were advertised as the LAST BEST WEST. Back then, to be a pioneer on the prairies of the Americas was still the ultimate contrast to the sophisticated European life. This was useful for those, like my great-grandfather Henry, who were looking to upend their European (and in his case Jewish) identities, and thus, to be a part of re-imagined society. For my family, the early 20th Century launched a life of pioneering, but the idea of Pioneering itself — the creation of a new identity via the land — was already ending. The Prairies really were the last best West.
Today, sandwiched between the skyscrapers and digital networks of North American ÜberProgress, the Great Plains of the 21st century feel like a million square miles of ghost town.
I came to the Great Plains — known in Canadian as “the Prairies” — flying across the Eastern United States, driving seven hours through North Dakota, looking for the remains of an idea. The Canadian border guards that had kept me in limbo between North Dakota and Saskatchewan for a half hour knew what I would find when they eventually wished me good luck. Good luck, they said, bye bye, happy travels. Meaning all the while, farewell city clown, enjoy the abyss.
The Prairie is a detour to emptiness. A gust blows my hat off, and I run after it, scampering crabwise through the tangle of tallgrass. Over a hill, I come across lone rusted grain silo, a scrap of civilization. Further up the hill, I see a tombstone that reads
THE MURRAY SMITH SCHOOL
No. 3034
OPENED – SEPTEMBER 28, 1914
CLOSED – AUGUST 17, 1939
NW32–1–14–W2ND
•
In a large apartment in the Polish city of Lublin, on an unremembered day in 1928, 10-year-old Helen Dresher, my grandmother, said goodbye to the painted angels on the ceiling of her home. The Dreshers, a wealthy Jewish family, were selling it all and taking off to homestead in the New World. Henry Dresher, the patriarch, told his wife and children that the streets of Canada were paved with gold. Perhaps he spoke of the little animals they would own and the quaintness of farm life, Jewish hay-dances and whatnot. Something that would make them all feel better about trading in the good life for the uncertainty of Utopia. For Henry, the promise of the new farm he had purchased in faraway Canada, of owning land, of controlling his destiny, of not hearing the recurrent cries in the streets — "Jew, go to Palestine!" — was worth more than all the pleasures of Krakowskie Przedmieście, Lublin’s grand boulevard. Canada was going to be their Palestine, and it was going to be great.
Ever since Moses dragged the whining Israelites through the desert, Utopianism and pioneering have gone hand in hand. For some, Paradise is a state of mind, but for the Utopian, Paradise is a place to go. In Utopia, a new place means a new set of rules, and the rules sculpt a new identity rent from the past. Europe periodically offered such idylls to Jewish people — eighth-century Spain, 16th-century Poland — but they weren’t Utopias so much as pit stops dependant upon the kindness of strangers. The rules of tolerance were sticky and they kept changing. Jews tried to be model Spanish citizens, model Dutch citizens, assimilated Austro-Hungarians, prominent Germans, always one step behind the rules.
For 2,000 years, a concerted effort was made to keep European Jews from owning and working the land under their feet. Farmer Jews. It sounds like a punch line. Itinerants and tent-pitchers can’t be farmers. But Jews were farmers for a long time, long before they were accountants and entertainment lawyers. All the exciting parts of the Old Testament — the floods, the plagues, the cannibalism — are titillating interludes in what is basically a boring rulebook for an agricultural society. "Thou shalt not sow your vineyard with two kinds of seed, lest all the produce of the seed which you have sown, and the increase of the vineyard become defiled.” “Thou shalt not plow with an ox and a donkey together.” The three major Jewish holidays — Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot — all follow the cycles of the harvest.
As the years passed and European Jews got further from the land, they turned to the trades that were allowed to them, like peddling and money- lending, good jobs for a people on the go. Unable to catch a break, by the late-19th- and early-20th-centuries, the main complaints against Jews were 1) that they were the avant-garde of evil modernity, decadents who controlled all the cash, and 2) strangely dressed outsiders. “Rootless cosmopolitans” is how Joseph Stalin put it. Fine, Jews began to say, who needs Europe anyway. We’ll find another place to go. Somewhere.
Nineteenth-century American and European intellectual circles were fascinated by Utopian agrarian projects. Vast swathes of still-undeveloped land throughout the Americas lured the economically and/or politically disenfranchised, as well as the urban claustrophobic, looking for a void into which they could release their Arcadian fantasies. There was a Biblical aspect to it all, even in the secular communities, with the colonist’s life promising glorious times for those willing to get together and plow. What people were better suited to become the new pioneers of idealism than the relatively educated and perpetually homeless European Jews, whose modus vivendi for thousands of years was to chase one liberal dreamland to the next, those pausing to looking back always paying the price, crumbling to salt. Survival and migration were one.
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Life was very hard for us…my father had to break virgin land and we helped him by picking stones…. We had no well on our farm (and of course, no indoor plumbing), so we had to get our water from a spring in the pasture. It was near the former Souris River, which had long since dried up and was covered in many places by mud, where often the cattle and horses would fall in, as it was a swamp…. The water from our spring was hard (the soap did not melt in it), so we had to go to Oungre, which was 2-and-a-half miles from our farm, to get soft water.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression brought with it a historic drought and “the Dust Bowl” became the new name for the Great Plains. The high prairie winds blew sand all over everything. Across the miles of field, Rebecca wrote, were the hollow carcasses of horses, old bits of bird’s nests, upside-down turkeys that drowned in the sand trying to hatch their young. Dust buried the occasional trees, with the tops of the branches sticking out like little fingers. Gophers infested their land. In the winter, temperatures dropped to 40 degrees below zero, and the children were wrapped in newspaper and warmed with flaming cow turds. When they were unable to produce crops, the Dreshers would harvest chunks of ice from the frozen dam and drag them to sell in Oungre in the summer. The children were able to make a few pennies when the nearby Oungre township started to offer money for dead gophers, three cents per disembodied tail. When the weather warmed, there were plagues of mosquitoes and grasshoppers. One night, fire consumed all the horses in the barn.
The Dreshers were allowed this opportunity thanks to the German businessman Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Hirsch was one of 19th-century Europe’s most prominent Jewish names, less well known than Rothschild but arguably as influential. It’s likely that, in its time, Hirsch’s multimillion-dollar Jewish Colonization Organization was the most substantial philanthropic project in the world. The J.C.A.’s main goal was to help Russian and Eastern European Jews form new agricultural communities on land the Baron had bought up in more promising New World countries — Canada, Argentina, Brazil. It’s not that the governments of these countries were so keen to welcome the new tribes as such. It was more that the Jews had obvious value as colonists. When the Dreshers arrived in Saskatchewan, the province was just 23 years old. It was a tabula rasa still drifting between the Wild Wild West and civilization. If these Jewish colonists had enough balls and stupidity to develop this wasteland, all the better for everyone else. The Dreshers were exactly what Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier was scouting for. Unfortunately for the government, the experiment in Jewish homesteading didn’t have much longevity.
From the late 1880s until roughly the late 1930s, there were about 10 major Jewish colonies in the Canadian Prairies, all within about 600 miles of Hoffer: Moosomin, Wapella, Hirsch, Lipton, Sonnenfeld, Narcisse Hamlet, Rumsey/Trochu, Alsask/Montefiore, and the cleverly named Edenbridge. (The Canadian government finally accepted this name after rejecting the initial proposals of “Jew Town” and “Israel Villa.” “Yidden,” which is a Yiddish pun on Eden, means “Jews.”) Fifty years was the time it took for the Jewish pioneers to find their ways back to the cities, to Winnipeg, Montreal, Vancouver. Like all the Utopian colonies that have sprouted throughout the Americas (with rare exceptions), failure was fated, and just like the others, the reasons are both obvious and elusive.
One by one the Dresher children left country for town, unconvinced of Henry’s project. In time, Henry and Ethel followed them to Montreal. Shortly after, Henry thought he would give farm life one last shot out in Repentigny on the Northern outskirts of Montreal, where he had believed his farming adventure would first begin. The Repentigny farm lasted just a short while before Henry was bought out (some have told me forcibly) by a hotelier. He moved back to Montreal and purchased a boarding house, which he named Dresher House, filling it with celebrities, artists, and bon vivants…finally a small community of his own, styled by the logic of the city.
What exactly is it that turns one plot of land into a ghost town and the other into a society? Theodore Herzl, the ultimate pioneer Jew, had his own answer. In June of 1895 Herzl wrote an impassioned letter to Baron de Hirsch. Herzl begged Hirsch to underwrite a burgeoning experiment called the “Promised Land”, which would exist in a yet-to-be-decided location. “Please believe me,” Herzl wrote, “the political life of an entire people…can be set in motion only with imponderables that float in the air.” It didn’t quite matter to Herzl where the Jews of Eastern Europe went, only that they went and went with purpose. More than philanthropy, Jews needed ideology. “Do you know what the German Reich sprang from?” wrote Herzl. “From dreams, songs, fantasies, and gold-black bands worn by students.” But Hirsch refused Herzl's proposal. The older and wealthier man wasn’t interested in imponderables. Jews, he thought, needed concrete things, more schools, more trades. In essence, more opportunities to assimilate. Not Paradise. The road to freedom must be slow, built brick by brick, Jew by Jew. It’s here we note the ironic. It was Israel — the fanciful Jewish State turned reality, which in its amateurish infancy had no plan, no strategy — that endured far beyond any of Hirsch’s colonies. A society built on floating imponderables.
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A few miles up the silent main highway, in nearby Oungre, I sat on the hood of my car, watching the drilling pumps in the distance, performing before the backdrop of land and sky. Not long after Henry and Ethel followed their children to Quebec and abandoned the prairie for good, oil was found on the farm, and now most of Oungre and the surrounding area is a theater of silent bobbing. The Dreshers would never be farmers, and wouldn’t regain their past wealth either — those pumps were reminders of both. It seems they only succeeded in shedding their pasts. And, of course, in surviving.
With the 20th century securely behind us, the old pioneering days are truly done. It’s not that we’ve lost the urge to redesign our identities, but we can no longer look to the land to do it for us. One thing that defines the 21st century is the end the rural dream. The Brooklyn rooftop gardens and Middle Eastern hydroponic cities of the future only prove this point. In just a brief hundred years, we went from farming of necessity, to farming for renewal, to farming as hobby.
Still… Hard, dirty, and pointless as it is, there’s something about the promise of the land that city folks just can’t shake from their bones. In his poem “Pioneers! O pioneers!”, Walt Whitman calls out “O resistless restless race!” leave the past behind and “debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world.” He published this in 1855, and yet it is a perfectly appropriate name for 21st-century humanity: “O resistless restless race!”
It’s unclear what our relationship to the land will be in the 21st century, or how we will continue to build and define societies that are divorced from the idea of “place” altogether. Perhaps they will be built on little more than floating imponderables. If nothing else, there’s something about the land that still reminds us of the pioneering spirit, of debouching into more expansive worlds. The land reminds us of our restlessness.
There’s a picture of the Dreshers on the day they arrived in Saskatchewan by train. Half sitting, half standing on the railway platform, they stare directly at the camera. They are all overdressed for the party — Henry wears a bowler hat, Ethel a stylish cloche. The eldest son Morris sports a stiff Double Round collar and tie, and strikes a dazzling and confident pose. Dead center, hands in pockets, face forward, is my 10-year-old grandmother. There’s a faint smile in her eyes and, in the corner of her mouth, a long stalk of hay. • 21 January 2010
Stefany Anne Golberg is an artist, writer, musician, and professional dilettante. She's a founding member of the art collective Flux Factory and lives in New York City. She can be reached at stefanyanne@gmail.com.
Photographs by Stefany Anne Golberg.
