“Red Factory” by Todros Geller. Courtesy of the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. Retrieved from: https://issuu.com/spertus/docs/todros-geller-exhibit-guide.
Isaac Moishe Nadir
Picture retrieved from: http://96thofoctober.com/creators/moyshe-nadir/
A Galician-born Yiddish writer, Yitshok Rayz immigrated to New York city when he was young. As a poet, journalist, and playwright, he published his works under the name of Isaac Moishe Nadir, the most enduring of his many pen names. He extensively traveled throughout Europe, Russia, and the U.S.
His Yiddish writings elucidate his catastrophic outlook on Detroit’s automotive industry. In his forty-page essay titled “The Ford Factories” (selected excerpts featured below), Nadir portrays Detroit as a “gumene shtot” and “flisike shtot,” which can be translated as “elastic” and “fluid” city, respectively, an entity that reconfigures itself as it devours and spews workers out on a daily basis.
By imputing human features to the metropolis, Nadir expresses his poignant criticism of the city's voracious industrialization. Ultimately, “The Ford Factories” thus allows us to observe urban Michigan through a Yiddish lens, and represents a piece of the larger legacies of Jewish immigration and multilingualism in the Midwest.
The Ford Factories
Translation by Maya Barzilai*
Nowadays Detroit is a city like all American cities. On “Main Street” are the banks, the large churches. Temples, restaurants, theaters. In the windows of the banks, you see electric swindle signs with verses from the Bible, in which you can find proof that the best passport to heaven is a…bankbook! In the churches, bells ring with idle mouths. They have nothing to say except for the word “busi-ness, business.” But the word “business” has only 1 letter n and a bell loves many ns all at once.
Detroit is a “fluid city.” Someone put it to me even better: it is an elastic city. She shrinks herself and stretches herself according to the need for workers and the automobile industry.
Have you already seen a Ford “sunset”? No? God bless you that you should have the pleasure and aim to see how Ford’s sun goes down in Detroit! It lights up and burns like a young exasperated widow, the wretch. The black smoke-veil suits her face. What else can I say, children? You clearly have to go see how Ford’s sun sets red… And how the edges of the city Detroit turn red. Other cities are in the habit of helping the sun set by firing a cannon; when the sun hears the shooting, she startles and – crack! She falls down, as if straight into the earth. Until the next day’s morning, when Jehovah and his 17 assistant-gods revive her a bit and shove her again up into the sky.
Here, in Detroit, Ford’s sun sets quietly – very quietly. You can barely hear how she sets.
Now I know what hell looks like.
In Ford’s River-Rouge plant, I found a much clearer portrayal of the horrors of that place than in Dante’s Inferno. The suffering with which one torments people, and they are not allowed to even to open their lips. —
And in that very city you can see trams with inscriptions: “Ford’s Works,” “Ford’s Highland Park,” Fordson” “River Rouge.” — Trams pull sleepy workers to and from the factories (River Rouge and Fordson – both are far behind the city).
The legend, that every Ford-worker has his own car is — now you can see after all! Who are the trams filled with? With “businessmen,” millionaires?
We depart in a car, and within a half hour’s drive from the city center, we arrive at the “Fordson.” A forest with smokestacks. Families of six or eight smokestacks at a time. Father chimneys tall, broad; mother-chimneys — a little stylish! The rest—kid-smokestacks come in all sizes… They toil together, mass productive, breathing out thick, suffocating oakum-smoke, dispersing it with black mourning-flags over their own heads. (Some of the chimneys droop down from the swirls of smoke, shady like the smoke itself!)
Around the shtetl Fordson, appear old-fashioned cable-cars, which move high up, forming a wide net that catches the smoke, like violin strings catching a tone.
*Maya Barzilai is Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, and Associate Professor in Middle East Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She researches modern Hebrew literature in comparative contexts, focusing on twentieth-century translations between Hebrew, German, and Yiddish.
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