I spent three hours at the Bothell library this morning reading Allan Tarnish's "The Rise of American Judaism", a 400+ page PhD thesis written in 1937 and microfilmed in 1961. Pretty good actually. With another book I have, I really feel that I've got the historical context for Maier Zunder. Truly a man who reflected his time. One interesting idea that I came of with this morning as he broght up topic after topic. "Is this one of Maier Zunder's issues?" Education, yes. Social life, yes. Mercantile, yes. Religious practice, no. Peddler, no. Squabbles within reform movement, no. Those things, they might be interesting but don't have much to do with my guy's story.
I have a letter from my grandmother where she remembered her own mother (Maier's daughter) complain that there were very few girls who graduated from high school and the only path for them was to teach and if your father was prominent, you couldn't do that either. She didn't marry until she was 28. The only bad rap I have on Maier is that he would not allow Delia (his youngest daughter) to marry who she wanted; didn't feel he was good enough. I think he went on to become a very successful attorney. She likely was encouraged strongly to marry her cousin Charles Weil.
It was on micrfilm which meant lots of fooling around with that machine. I actually got it to print fairly well. IF the original was readable. Sometimes you couldn't read the original but you could read the printed copy. This involved many many dimes. Fortunately for me, nobody else seems to want to use that machine. So I'm in luck!
Tried to find a picture of the rabbi who wrote the thesis (hand corrections and crossed out text and all). He went on to write quite a bit. No picture of him, but I have a picture of his grave.
That will have to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment