Comrades and Chicken Ranchers
The Story of a California Jewish Community
Petaluma, California once was a small-town agricultural community, where Jewish chicken ranchers enjoyed a vibrant Yiddish and Hebrew cultural life, maintained intense socialist and Zionist commitments “like a little New York,” and participated in sharp conflicts between themselves, with political battles for control of the single Jewish Community Center. They fought Nazi Brown Shirts who marched in the streets of Petaluma. They tried to help Holocaust survivors who settled in their community. They encountered McCarthyism and FBI snooping during the Cold War in Petaluma, with volatile Jewish community divisions. Throughout, they raised chickens and sustained families on little ranches, even through the Depression, until they faced a crisis with the national transformation of chicken ranching in the 1960s.
Kenneth Kann, in this unique work of oral history, has ingeniously arranged and edited interviews with more than two hundred people, some telling life stories in their own Yiddishized English. We meet an array of striking characters and families from three generations: East European Jewish immigrant settlers who establish an Old World shtetl-like community, their American born children who are attracted to the American world around them, and the baby boomer grandchildren who assimilate into American life and struggle to maintain connection to their Jewish community and history.
The cast is vibrant, their words touching and often hilarious. Comrades and ChickenRanchers is a delight.
Praise for Comrades and Chicken Ranchers
“This book is a portrait of the Petaluma Jewish community from the early years of the century to the present day.... Kenneth L. Kann interviewed more than two hundred residents, representing three generations of Jewish Americans. The picture that emerges from their testimony is of a wonderfully animated and fractious community.... Its history blends many of the familiar themes of American Jewish life into a richly individual tapestry.”
— Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
“Comrades and Chicken ranchers is more than the recollections of the small Petaluma Jewish community. It is the story of the U.S.A. and its citizen writ large…what an egg basket Kenneth Kann dipped into: a treasure of golden stories.”
— The Oakland Museum Magazine
“…what’s most gripping in these pages are the distinctive voices of Kann’s informants—boisterous, intelligent, at once high minded and keenly alive to every squabble and disagreement to hit the community in the past 40 years. These talkers, with their pointed anecdotes, their boastful tales of business acumen and political fervor, and their opinions on everything under the sun, makes the book come keenly to life on every page… Comrades and Chicken Ranchers is a constant delight.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“…a vibrant and compelling history told through the words of Jewish socialist chicken ranchers who came to Petaluma from eastern Europe in the first three decades of the twentieth century.”
— Petaluma Argus Courier
“…a microcosm of the great patterns of immigration and assimilation, ethnic community life and ethnic identity in twentieth-century America.”
— The Recorder