Many of the Yiddish-speaking Jews who came to Los Angeles were attracted to the area by an aggressive promotional campaign waged by civic and business leaders. At the turn of the 20th century, Los Angeles’ economy remained largely agricultural and while home to a diverse population, most of the area’s land, natural resources, political and financial capital were highly concentrated in the hands of a small group of Anglo elites, including among them Central European Jewish immigrants. These elites stood to profit tremendously from the city’s growth and so, in an effort to grow the State’s population and economy, they pooled their funds to form booster organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchant and Manufacturers’ Association, to promote the city’s image. The boosters advanced the region’s reputation as a modern Garden of Eden – the “Land of Sunshine” – a haven of health and homeownership where, free of entrenched hierarchies and social barriers, every man could realize his personal ambitions. In promotional pamphlets and advertisements, they employed romantic, idyllic images of the city’s Spanish past to cast the city as a modern-day pueblo, free of the overcrowded slums, dirty smokestacks, and social unrest of the industrial cities of the east, where the copious sunshine and balmy climate afforded all residents access to “the good life.”²

The boosters’ campaign served to create a unique pattern of Jewish settlement. The promise of economic opportunity enticed the Industrial Removal Office (IRO), an organization based in New York that sought to relieve congestion in Eastern cities by relocating Jewish immigrants to other parts of the country, who sent some 2,220-2,300 Jewish immigrants to Los Angeles in the hopes they would find better opportunities there.³ Other early twentieth century arrivals were health seekers attracted by the boosters’ claim’s about Los Angeles’ curative climate, people who came west seeking relief from a variety of chronic conditions, including tuberculosis, asthma, and rheumatism. By some estimates, twenty-five percent of those who settled in Los Angeles between 1880 and 1920 came seeking to cure their own illness or those of their loved ones. Healthseekers comprised such a large portion of the new Eastern European Jewish arrivals that more established Jewish residents worried that the city would be “overrun with people who have come from all parts of the world in quest of health, with little health and little means.”⁴ In Los Angeles, these dreams of health and dreams of opportunity coalesced, providing a powerful draw for those seeking renewal for themselves and their fellow Jews.

The growth of Hollywood only enhanced the boosters’ efforts to promote the city and the industry itself became an additional draw for Jewish migrants from the East. Lured by the availability of cheap land and the prospect of year- round production, several of the nation’s largest studios relocated to the city in the 1910s and a decade later, those studios produced 90% of the films made in the United States. Not only did Hollywood open new avenues of potential employment, particularly for Jewish writers and artists including some of those featured in this digital exhibit, but also raised the city’s cultural cache and notoriety.
In combination with the discovery of oil in Signal Hill near Long Beach, the growth of the film industry spurred unprecedented economic and industrial development in the city in the 1920s. With the promise of cheap land to build plants, low labor costs, and access to Hollywood trendsetters, garment manufacturers relocated their operations to Los Angeles, as did rubber producers and auto companies who sought to profit from the city’s booming oil industry. The city’s industrial development continued through the 1930s with several of the nation’s largest corporations opening large plants in Los Angeles, including automotive companies like Firestone and General Motors, food processing companies General Foods, and aerospace companies like Lockheed Martin and Douglas Aircraft Company. As Europe descended into war in the late 1930s, Southern California’s economy was boosted by the $40 billion in defense contracts and Federal investment in the State, and the abundance of new jobs attracting thousands of Black and white Americans from the South, Mexican and Mexican Americans, and an increasing number of Eastern European Jews and their American-born children who moved west from the industrial cities of the Midwest and the East Coast. Between 1920 and 1940, Los Angeles’ population grew from 576,673 to 1,504,277, surpassing Cleveland, Boston and St. Louis to become the 5th largest city in the U.S.

Jewish population growth accelerated in this twenty-year period rising from 28,000 in 1920 to 91,000 in 1930 and over 130,000 by 1940.⁵ Most of the new arrivals came to Los Angeles after having spent years elsewhere in America and brought with them some financial resources, skills, and in most cases, fluency and literacy in English. Many settled in Boyle Heights, the residential neighborhood east of the LA River, which was home to some 24,000 Jews by 1930, the highest concentration of Jews west of Chicago. The area had been populated by a handful of wealthy landowners until the late 19th century, when the city constructed a series of bridges and streetcar lines to facilitate access to downtown from communities east of the Los Angeles River. Landowners quickly subdivided their estates, opening up an increasing number of smaller holdings and rental properties. Boyle Heights, and the neighboring community of City Terrace, offered easy access to downtown and a variety of lots and single-family homes affordable for wage-earners and professionals alike, attracting a diverse population of residents that included large numbers of Mexican, Japanese, Armenian, and white Russian immigrants. 

Although Jews never comprised a demographic majority in Boyle Heights, even when the Jewish population rose to its peak of over 50,000 residents in the late 1930s, the neighborhood became the epicenter of Yiddish culture in Los Angeles, home to the city’s Yiddish-based fraternal organizations, including the Arbeter Ring and the IWO (International Workers Order), their affiliated Yiddish folk shuln, Yiddish publishing houses and book stores, unions, political parties, theatre troupes and choruses. It also became a center for Orthodox Judaism, home to a dozen synagogues and shuls, the largest of which, the Breed Street Shul, had over 400 member families, as well as Jewish charitable organizations, including the Jewish Home for the Aged and Mt. Sinai Hospital and Clinic. And it was the center of the Jewish ethnic market in Los Angeles, its main thoroughfare, Brooklyn Avenue, lined with Jewish-owned bakeries, kosher butcheries, delis, and restaurants, that gave the neighborhood a tangible, and tasty, Jewish flavor.

The presence of these Jewish institutions has earned Boyle Heights a reputation as “Los Angeles’ Lower East Side,” but in some ways, life in Boyle Heights was more like life in the suburbs than the densely-crowded neighborhoods of the industrial capitals of the East. Over 80% of the residences in the neighborhood were single-family homes, and many of the Jews who settled there, even those who worked for wages, owned their own homes, cars, and, in some cases, opened their own businesses. This particular built environment was consistent throughout Los Angeles, where strict zoning laws, including a 150-foot height limit on construction, limited density in residential development. While other neighborhoods in the city were far less diverse – most governed by restrictive racial covenants that prevented non-whites from owning or renting property – Boyle Heights bore little resemblance to the densely crowded, urban districts that many of its new residents left behind. 

 
Even for those who didn’t settle in Boyle Heights, moving Los Angeles was a significant adjustment, introducing Jewish migrants to new topographies and environments and new cultural and ethnic traditions that challenged their understandings of their identities. And as the works in this anthology show, the Yiddish writers of Los Angeles used their writing to make sense of their new surroundings and actively experimented with new topics and new motifs. Many critically examined the contours of Jewish life in the city and the consequences that Los Angeles’ easy, suburban living had on community life. Others contemplated the role Los Angeles might play for the global Jewish community by reflecting on the communities they’d left behind in Europe and America, often adopting the voice of outsiders to offer their observations on Jewish life in their new home. While the themes and topics varied, all of the Yiddish writers who settled in Los Angeles worked actively to nurture and develop a distinct literary community in Los Angeles that would give voice to the unique experiences of Jews on the Pacific Coast and thereby contribute to transnational yiddishkayt.