My reason for choosing this topic today is a discussion on
Dov Bear about Tisha B'Av. Specifically, my husband mentioned in the comments that he did not go to shul (which was for a specific reason) and someone chose to harshly criticize him. Without getting into this issue, it reminded me of my father telling me that people always worked on Tisha B'Av. There were too many holidays in the year (in the days before paid vacation and where loss of a day's income meant you didn't eat), and you went to work as normal on Tisha B'Av.
My father's parents were born in the "old country" and his experiences growing up were directly with the immigrant generation of his aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Most people my age have parents who are one generation removed from this, so I am fortunate to be able to ask him things that he has personal experience with regarding our family' history.
I recently came to the realization, confirmed by asking my dad, that he was raised Orthodox. I don't know why I never thought about it from that perspective before. My father grew up in a kosher home, family observed the holidays, and he attended cheder as a child.
However, he has told me about the reality for his family that I believe is representative of what a majority of people experienced. First, his father was (to his great sadness) unable to not work on Saturday. This is during the Depression - I know there are stories of people who were able to quit their job every Friday and find another on Sunday, but it is only because the majority of their Jewish brothers weren't doing so. If everyone had done this, not only would there not have been jobs available, but people would have stopped hiring Jews at all. I emphasize that it was not that my grandfather was trying to get out of observing - quite the opposite. There was just a reality at that time that is so beyond any of our understanding. (I can say this even more now after going through extreme financial difficulties - thank G-d we can't even begin to understand the financial difficulties of the Depression.)
In addition, children needed to work. If you are a parent, can you even imagine such a thing? By my father's time this was already less of a reality for many people, but for my grandfather in an immigrant family, that was life. My grandfather was one of the younger of 11 children. His older sisters, as teenagers, never went to high school but were sent to work. His older brother was sent through cheder and yeshiva - and it is this great-uncle's descendents who remained religious. (Some are involved on a high level with Torah.org, and another was honored at YU as a third-generation graduate.)
However, when it came to my grandfather and the other younger brother, the family needed them to work also. So he was not able to continue his formal education (neither secular nor religious - he did not even go to high school.)
Whenever I hear broad generalizations about people from the immigrant generation and beyond who became less observant or completely uninvolved, I feel that people don't have the awareness of what the reality was. One of the difficulties is that most people of that generation, due to their hard life both in Europe and America, did not ever talk about it. Even basic info like their grandparents names, let alone discussing what life was like. They wanted to forget. It is only now when people like myself are interested in genealogy and Jewish traditional life, that we are sad that we could not hear the stories these hard-working, G-d-fearing people would have been able to tell us.
