Why did Gitel’s family settle in South Bend, Indiana, a place better known for Catholic Notre Dame University than a thriving Jewish community? Why not in Chicago, where there was a huge Jewish presence of some 200,000 mostly Eastern-European Jews in the early 20th century.

In 2007 a study by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology was published entitled Indiana Jewish Heritage Survey: A Study of the Impact of a People on the Built Environment. The study found that the Jewish population in South Bend had increased from 125 Jews in 1878 to 1,200 by 1912. So, when Yankel came from Borisov, Belarus in 1907, there may have been slightly more than 1,000 Jews. The study emphasized that most of the Jewish population was German-Jewish, which makes it even more surprising that a Russian-Jewish family would have chosen this destination. Nevertheless, this fact in the novel Gitel’s Freedom is true. Gitel grew up in South Bend.

While the Jewish population of South Bend was never very large, the study notes that the community established houses of worship that conformed to different denominations of Judaism, including Orthodox and Reform, and later Conservative. (Of course!) The novel mentions the Orthodox Taylor Street Shul, which my grandfather helped to establish near where they lived. The Orthodox congregation began in 1887 and met in various places until the group purchased the 410 South Taylor Street site in 1916. The congregation worshiped there from 1922 to 1970, when they relocated to their current location. My mother and I spent Yom Kippur at the Taylor Street Shul in 1953, because my grandmother Rayzel had died a few days before.

Alas, whatever impelled Yankel to settle the family in South Bend has been lost to time. There is no definitive answer — but we can guess. For example, there are persistent stories about Jewish immigrants who landed in New York and took a train as far west as their finances would allow. When they had no more money for fare, they made a life wherever they were. Whether or not those stories are apocryphal, they probably did not apply to Yankel who seemed to have arrived with some capital. But the story may have applied to a different man from Borisov, who immigrated earlier and suggested that Yankel come to South Bend. Alternatively, Yankel may have thought that his economic prospects would be better in the small town of South Bend than among the mass of Jews competing for jobs or occupations in Chicago. Yankel became a scrap metal dealer, an occupation that indeed would have had a lot of competition among the Jews clustered around Maxwell Street and Lawndale in Chicago.

What do you think the answer is to “why South Bend?”