‘In an alien, heathen land, harsh and bare and hostile’
Little in the lives of these thousands of Eastern European Jews suggested that, once processed at Ellis Island, they would proceed to find their way to North Dakota as homesteaders. Prevented by laws from owning land in Czarist Russia, few Jews had known the life and learned the skills of farming. Most were traders or peddlers, wholly dependent on the commerce provided by close-knit communities nestled in urban ghettos or rural villages. In fact, not only did they lack the practical means to work the rocky soil of the high plains, they lacked the conceptual means to even form an idea of such a life. In her austere memoir Dakota Diaspora: Memoir of a Jewish Homesteader, Sophie Trupin describes this sense of imaginative disconnect. Soon after landing in the U.S. with her family, Sophie began to hear a mysterious word. They were bound for “Nordokata.” It was there that “our traveling would come to an end. We had no idea what it would be like. But whatever it was, we would finally rest.”
What they found, however, gave them little time to rest. These settlers had escaped the densely populated world of the ghetto, marked by shared religious and cultural traditions and wracked by spasms of antisemitic violence, for a world free not just of antisemitism, but free of most everything else they had associated with normal life. For the Greenbergs and their fellow Jewish homesteaders, this brave new world resembled the one that greeted Sophie Trupin: “An alien, heathen land, harsh and bare and hostile.”
Oddly, the material conditions of these immigrants in the northern fringes of North Dakota often resembled the material conditions of immigrants in the Lower East Side. Privacy was as rare a commodity as indoor plumbing. The Trupins trekked to the well dug “at the foot of the hill upon which our house stood,” while others had to move their shanties to accompany the wells they had to dig. Heating during the winter was also a dicey affair in both the urban and rural settings; in both places, families often depended on the heat generated by bodies snuggling close together to survive cold nights. Even the intensity of labor was similar in both worlds. Many immigrants trapped in the infamous sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side were also forced to work 15-hour days (and nights), not unlike the unrelenting labor of the men who tilled the Dakotan soil. “It seems to me as I look back,” Sophie Trupin writes, “all the rows and heaps of rocks that lay along each cleared field were stained with the sweat of these zealots.”