The Men Who Weren’t There

Has anybody, walking along a street, casually looking at someone ahead of him, ever seen a human being vanish? It is a common experience to think that one has seen something like this occur.
—Charles Fort, Lo!, 1930

Inexplicable human disappearances—and miraculous reappearances—were a mainstay for Charles Fort, the “man who invented the supernatural.” Regarding the above quote, Fort goes on to say that many of these accounts of disappearances were previously explained as ghost sightings, but may in fact be glimpses of one’s own self and/or involuntary teleportation. (Among his many achievements, Fort actually coined the term teleportation.)

Between 1919 and 1931, Fort published four genre-defying collections of anomalous tidbits and unverifiable anecdotes. For a good part of that time, he used the New York Public Library as his office, combing through dozens of periodicals for fresh material. Though he was a New Yorker during the peak era of the global Yiddish press, Yiddish is lacking much representation in Forteana, the field of anomalous inquiry named in his honor.

That’s a shame, because the Yiddish press in the early to mid 1900s had plenty of stories about people disappearing.

In 1945, a story appeared in the Morgn Zhurnal about a Jewish man in a Ukrainian dorf, a village even smaller than a shtetl. The man’s name was Betsalel-Pesakh and he was a shoykhet, a ritual slaughterer. He, too, mysteriously disappeared one day, vi in vaser arayn, without a trace, as it were. The explanation, however, has disappointingly little to do with teleportation.

The story is written as a humorous reminiscence of life in the Old Country, though it gets at one of the most serious internal Jewish issues of that time. The description of Betsalel-Pesakh, or “Tsali,” is thickly layered with intra- and inter-communal animosities: for example, noting how people in Tsali’s area pronounced a certain vowel slightly differently than those people in surrounding areas. More importantly, this writer says, Tsali did not fit the image of a Jewish “kley-koydesh” or ritual functionary. He was powerfully built and broad shouldered—the kind of guy who wears worker’s boots, not a kley-koydesh’s pantofl (slippers). Tsali didn’t look like a Jew should look, and that was apparent to both Jew and non-Jew.

Tsali would spend the week away from home, traveling from village to village, shekhting (ritually slaughtering) chickens and other beasts for the Jewish women. Then something unusual happens. The non-Jewish women start requesting Tsali’s services. And one day, Tsali simply doesn’t return home. “Oys tsali. Vi in vaser arayn.” No more Tsali. Disappeared without a trace, as if swallowed up by the water.

A few months later, there is news. “Tsali iz take arayn ‘in vaser’.” Tsali had literally gone “into the water.” Rather than being teleported to a Fortean dimension, he had taken baptism and married a non-Jewish woman in a neighboring village, without bothering to tell the wife he already had at home. Tsali the shoykhet was now Tsali the market pig slaughterer.

On learning the news, Tsali’s abandoned wife, her father, and her brothers run to the rebbe for advice. Instead of advice, however, the aggrieved family gets a bit of Talmudic wordplay. The rebbe notes that the Passover sacrifice, the korbn pesakh, can only be eaten tsali or “roasted” and, the rebbe sighs, he is afraid this Tsali is already roasted. The rebbe’s advice? “Forget ’em!”

If that strikes you as callous, to say the least, you’re not alone. Though this particular writer doesn’t say the word, the problem of agunes or “chained women”—women abandoned by their husbands without a Jewish divorce—was all over Yiddish popular discourse of the time. Last November, I wrote about how Isaac Bashevis Singer had a special interest in the plight of agunes, as seen in his essays for the Forverts. In May, I wrote about how the figure of the agune was important to the foundation of modern Yiddish theater. When it came to agunes, everyone felt bad about them, sort of, but no one, certainly no one with any power, actually had an interest in doing anything about it.

The story of disappearing husbands, and abandoned wives, is now the center of a new exhibit at YIVO, Runaway Husbands, Desperate Families: The Story of the National Desertion Bureau, co-presented by YIVO and The Jewish Board.

The era of mass migration brought millions of Eastern European Jews to North America and (they hoped) new economic opportunity. It also created massive social change and upheaval within families. A product of that upheaval was an epidemic of family desertion, usually men, who simply walked away and started new lives elsewhere. As you can imagine, family desertion was a devastating financial blow to immigrant families, most of whom were already living precariously. Abandoned wives were desperate to locate their wayward husbands, and they used whatever methods they could to find them.

In the early 1900s, Abraham Hochman was just a local psychic, plying his trade on the Lower East Side. But in 1903, Hochman gained attention when local and national news reported on his involvement with the case of Minnie Cohen and her missing husband. When Minnie Cohen went to see him, Hochman successfully predicted where Mr. Cohen would be found that very night. Minnie saw to it that he was arrested on the spot, and he was ordered to start paying the alimony he owed her.

Given the scale of the problem, one psychic was simply not enough. In 1908, the Forverts newspaper began publishing its (in)famous Gallery of Missing Husbands feature. Pictures of the deserting husbands were run, along with pertinent information that might be used to identify them. One of the fascinating parts of YIVO’s new exhibit is that it spotlights a few of the men who appeared in the gallery, rounding out their stories with details about their lives, and, where applicable, their apprehension.

The photos that appeared in the gallery were cropped to resemble mugshots. But within the files of the National Desertion Board, researchers found many of the original pictures from which those mugshots were taken. When seen in their entirety, these photos confront us with the men behind the scoundrels: fathers, soldiers, and young men at leisure.

It was in 1911 that the American Jewish social service apparatus responded to the crisis with the creation of the National Desertion Bureau. The bureau tracked down missing husbands and persuaded them to meet their financial obligations, often maintaining cases across many years. Unlike a psychic, or the Forverts, the NDB could take full advantage of the social and legal levers at its disposal. It coordinated with a broad network of Jewish organizations across the country, as well as law enforcement and the American court system, all with the goal of reuniting families and, most importantly, making sure that large numbers of newly arrived Jews didn’t become wards of the state. Respectability politics was core to the NDB mission.

Indeed, this focus on socioeconomics, and the integration of Jewish communal care into the American legal system, is what makes the NDB story so uniquely American and Jewish. Many of the documents in the exhibit attest to the extensive, systematic involvement of law enforcement, something rather hard to imagine in the European context. And the Old World’s agune problem is barely a whisper here, even though the issue of agunes is inherent in the desertion epidemic. The NDB was a thoroughly New World phenomenon, formed to meet a specific socioeconomic problem in the American context.

As YIVO says on its website, “From 1905 through the 1960s, the Bureau tracked more than 18,000 cases. Its files are rich in detail and are often short novellas unto themselves, with details on the tragedy of marital dissolution, abandoned children, and financial ruin.” The case histories featured in the exhibit run from darkly funny to the infuriating and tragic. You will be surprised how many unlucky women were named Ida, and the vital importance of Cleveland as a spot for men on the lam.

You won’t be surprised to find that the overwhelming majority of desertions had the most prosaic of causes: another woman. Nonetheless, the story of the disappearing husbands has enough human intrigue to satisfy the most curious, and even Charles Fort. As the psychic Abraham Hochman called out to the women waiting to consult with him: “Venus is ascendant—husbands beware!”

Deserted Families: Runaway Husbands, Desperate Families will be at YIVO through fall 2024. For historians and scholars, the exciting news is that the case files of the National Desertion Bureau are at YIVO and available for serious researchers. The archive contains “about 20,000 files on individual cases of desertion of families by husbands. Index card file of clients, alphabetically arranged.” Don’t expect to just drop in and browse, however. Because of the sensitive nature of the materials, researchers must make arrangements ahead of time and be prepared to demonstrate a substantial purpose for using the NDB archive … For another perspective on the fractured Jewish family, Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin’s only novel was recently translated into English as Desires. In it, a woman struggles with the aftermath of her own infidelity and its reverberations after the death of her only child. Join translator Anita Norich in conversation with the Yiddish Book Center’s Lisa Newman as they talk about Dropkin’s exploration of love, eroticism, and domesticity in the immigrant milieu. Live at the YBC and online, Sept. 15 at 2 p.m. More information and register here.

ALSO: The Congress for Jewish Culture recently co-produced its annual commemoration for the Soviet Yiddish writers and artists murdered on Aug. 12, 1952. You can watch the video of the event for free on the Congress for Jewish Culture YouTube page … Rabbi and Yiddish student Marna Sapsowitz and Yiddish teacher Sharon Power will discuss their experience leading a khevruse dedicated to Yiddish tkhines. Their talk, “Our Summer of Tkhines,” will explore Yiddish tkhines for topics ranging from candlelighting and challah, to the High Holidays, to getting married, to innovative American tkhines for the Titanic disaster or for immigrants who hear bad news from the Old Country. Sept. 22, 2 p.m. ET. More information and register here … Also on Sept. 22, “Remembering Fishl Kutner, a Tribute Program.” Fishl Kutner dedicated his life to Yiddish culture, serving as president of the International Association of Yiddish Clubs (IAYC), among many other things. Sunday, Sept. 22, at noon. Co-sponsored by YIVO and IAYC. More information and register here.