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Special section: Beyond the Pletzl: Jewish urban histories in interwar France
*. I would like to thank Erin Corber, Ari Joskowicz, Lisa Leff, Nadia Malinovich, Meredith Scott-Weaver, David Shneer, Barry Trachtenberg, David Weinberg and the anonymous readers of Urban History for their careful readings of and comments on earlier versions of this piece.
In 1926, Aron Beckerman, a Yiddish-speaking, communist Jew from Biala Podlaska, Poland, settled in Paris' 20th arrondissement. Upon his arrival, he made women's bags during the day and worked as a journalist and writer at night. Beckerman was one of the estimated 150,000 immigrant eastern European Jews in interwar Paris. Arriving from different points across eastern Europe, Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Paris experienced a city unlike anywhere they had seen before - the boulevards, the smells, the sights and the numerous public displays of history were all new to many of those first setting foot on western European soil. Like many others, Beckerman tried to make sense of his new home. Unlike others, however, Beckerman had a means through which to disseminate his ideas on what Paris was and could be for Jewish immigrants: his journalism. By describing and defining Parisian history and urban locales in a variety of periodicals, he was instrumental in helping other immigrants understand, become acclimated and find community in Paris. Beckerman's writings illustrate how an eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Jew created a vision of Paris for new immigrants that was based on a historical, urban and architectural understanding of their new place of residence. He kept one eye focused on eastern Europe and the Jewish experience from which he and others came; the other on Paris (which would at times stand in for France as a whole) and the emancipatory, revolutionary and republican values it represented, which he framed through an explicitly historical and urban understanding of the city.
Descriptions of Jews' arrivals into Paris during the post-World War I period highlight the social and economic stratification and the different experiences had by a variety of Jewish immigrants. Roger Perelman, who was born to eastern European Jewish immigrants in Paris in 1933, says of his father's arrival in 1923 at Paris' Gare du Nord, 'My father was dazzled by the oranges sold by street vendors, which he bought immediately:...