If you are a regular at the Jewish Community Center on Park Heights Avenue, you quickly realize that the steam room is the domain of crusty old guys from the former Soviet Union. They chat in Russian, like their steam scalding hot and beat themselves with whisks. In Russia, those whisks are traditionally made of leafy birch twigs; here strands of nylon ropes are used. When that hot nylon hits the bare skin, it hurts, but the body and soul, deriving strength from suffering, rejoice, or so the bathers say.
The other morning sprang a surprise. Insteadof speaking Russian, as he usually does, a man who immigrated from Poland more than two decades ago, was conversing in Yiddish with a middle-aged American. I told them how surprised I was. “Never in my 37 years in Baltimore have I heard anyone speak Yiddish,” I said.
It wasn?t always like that.
Until the 1960s, Baltimore retained many relics of its mostly pre-World War II European immigration. Local newspapers were printed not only in Yiddish, but in Polish, Lithuanian and German. There were Sunday radio programs in those languages and in several others as well. Churches held services in foreign tongues.
It is still possible to worship in German, 9:15 a.m. each Sunday, at Zion Lutheran Church near City Hall, but these days you have to talk to God mostly in American. There are exceptions, of course. Korean churches flourish around the Beltway, and the number of Hispanic congregations of Pentecostalist bent is on the rise.
I?m thinking about all this as I pass a 7-Eleven at Broadway and Lombard streets. That?s a corner that attracts literally hundreds of Hispanic job seekers every morning. Landscape contractors and builders scoot by, if they are in need of day laborers. At that corner English is seldom heard, all chatter is in Spanish. If the bathers at the Jewish Community Centers are relics of past waves of immigration, those gathering around the Seven-11 represent today?s realities.
You may encounter some of them, quite accidentally. When I needed a huge tulip poplar taken down, I contracted a well-established tree-removal company to do the job. The guy who actually climbed to the tree and did most of the work was a Panamanian. He was in his late 20s and already hard of hearing, the result, I suspect, of his using a power saw without any ear protection.
As America debates the pros and cons of illegal immigration, this needs to be said: Compared to many other U.S. cities, Baltimore is not a big immigrant town and never has been.
Why this is is not clear. Sure, Baltimore has always had its share of immigrant groups and distinctive ethnic neighborhoods; this, after all, is America. But although Baltimore was, after Ellis Island, the second-largest entry point for European immigrants in the U.S., relatively few stayed here. Instead, as soon as immigrants arrived in Locust Point, B&O trains whisked them to the Midwest or West.
As a result, in 1910, at the height of European immigration to the United States, “less than 16 percent [of Baltimoreans] had been born abroad ? a percentage smaller than that of any other city among the 10 largest in the country.” This is a quotation from James B. Crooks? important book, “Politics and Progress: The Rise of Urban Progressivism in Baltimore, 1895 to 1911,” and other researchers have confirmed his data.
Of those foreign-born, almost 60 percent were originally from Germany. Today, one is hard pressed to find a German restaurant in Baltimore.
Larger than any single immigrant group in 1910 were Baltimore?s blacks. But even though their numbers later multiplied because of inmigration from the Carolinas, good luck finding a soul food restaurant here.
So I opt for highly spiced Thai food. It tastes terrific. But don?t expect to find Thais in the kitchen. I guess they are busy getting their MBAs, because the cooks are from El Salvador.
Only in America.
Antero Pietila is writing a book about how bigotry shaped Baltimore between 1910 and 1975. His e-mail address is [email protected].
