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Meeting the Neighbors
P A G E 2
“When my Aunt Sarah was born, my grandfather was away peddling. The rain had cut a hole in the roof of the sod farmhouse, and my grandmother was about to give birth to her fifth child. She was in pain and obviously suffering. My mother remembered the scene well. All of a sudden two Indians appeared in the house. They looked at my grandmother, saw the condition she was in, and without saying a word turned and walked out. Within ten minutes two squaws were in the house, and they delivered my Aunt Sarah. They never knew where those Indians came from, but after that my grandmother insisted on moving off the farm.”
Henry Fine, North Dakota Memories, Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 9, 1977. From the 1870s to the late 1880s, the Phillips family homesteaded outside Moorhead, Minnesota, and, later, across the Red River near Fargo, North Dakota.
“When it would come to the holiday, we would always go to the synagogue. It was hard to leave the livestock... but we had very good gentile neighbors... My parents would always have gentile help-Russian or Polish. In that school we spoke so much Polish that when they asked me what nationality I was, I said ‘I’m half Jewish and half Polish.’”
Ida Cohen Golberg, oral history, 1981. The Golberg family farmed just outside of Duluth in the early 1900s. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
top photo: The Phillips family in front of their Fargo, North Dakota home, 1890s. Courtesy of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest.
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