In Insular Iowa Town, a Jolt of Worldliness

Used to be if you wanted a quickie breakfast here, your choices were pretty much limited to doughnuts: one with sticky pink frosting or one smeared with gooey chocolate. Now you can get a kosher blueberry bagel. Or a loaf of dense, tangy Russian bread. Or even a Mexican pastry.

Diversity has arrived in this tiny farm town, and locals are trying hard to cope.

For 150 years, Postville was all white, all Christian, all Norman Rockwell, an everyone-knows-everyone, live-and-die-here kind of town run by farmers of German and Norwegian stock. Then, a decade ago, an ultra-Orthodox Jew bought a boarded-up meat-packing plant on the edge of town and converted it into a kosher slaughterhouse. Word soon got out that Postville had jobs. Lots of jobs.

The Jews came first--three dozen rabbis trained to kill and inspect kosher meat, plus friends and relatives to help. Then came the others. Mexican, Guatemalan, Ukrainian, Nigerian, Bosnian, Czech--dozens, then hundreds, of immigrants swarmed to jobs in the kosher slaughterhouse and in the Iowa Turkey Products plant next door. To locals, it seemed an invasion.

“It was a little scary at first,” said Becky Meyer, a lifelong resident.

“You’d see them and you wouldn’t really know how to talk to them, how to act around them,” high school sophomore Wade Schutte recalled. “It took a while to adjust.”

And no wonder. Postville’s population is just 1,500, “and that’s counting everyone and their dog,” locals say. It’s isolated too, pinned by endless rolling fields in the northeast corner of a state that’s still 95% white. Many folks born and raised here until recently had never met a black person, never met a Jew, never heard a foreign language except in school.

Now they run into rabbis in long black coats and prayer shawls walking down the streets--their streets--speaking Hebrew. On their way to the pharmacy, they pass a Mexican store decorated with bullfight posters, selling refried beans. There’s a Spanish Mass at the Catholic church, a Ukranian woman teaching English as a second language. There are Hanukkah cards in the drugstore.

Some locals--raised, no doubt, on the maxim that if they can’t say anything nice, they shouldn’t say anything at all--purse their lips with unmistakable disgust and refuse to talk about Postville’s new look. But many here are trying, really trying, to adjust.

“This is a little town that’s 20-some miles from even a McDonald’s,” reasoned Doug All, a quality inspector at the slaughterhouse, “so we have to get along.”

But even the best-intentioned Postvillians are new at this diversity business. It shows.

One woman announces, with evident pride, that she’s tasted, and enjoyed, Mexican food. Only she pronounces her find “tortil-la” as though it rhymes with “vanilla.”

Then there’s the city councilwoman who boasts of renting rooms to newcomers from Russia. Well, maybe not Russia. They insist they’re from Kazakhstan. She has no clue what they mean. “I imagine it’s just another state there,” she said, “but I couldn’t tell you. I call it Russia.”

‘It’s Way Different From California’

If locals are unsure what to make of the newcomers, the feeling is mutual. Summoned by a sort of international hotline that passes word whenever a friend of a friend of a friend finds work, immigrants come to Postville knowing jobs await them--and knowing precious little else.

“The first time I’d ever heard of Iowa was when we moved here,” said 15-year-old Ilya Pakarov of Kazakhstan.

“It’s way different from California,” sighed Susy Navarro, who moved here from Oakland so her husband could work the 2 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift at the slaughterhouse.

The uneasy melding of cultures in Postville reflects a broader drama playing out across the Midwest and the South. Wherever there are jobs, there are immigrants. And meatpacking plants--mainly chicken in the South, beef or pork in the Midwest--offer jobs aplenty. It’s grimy, grinding work, to be sure, but it’s much more lucrative than seasonal toil in the fields of California or Texas. The plants are always handing out overtime. Workers can earn money 12 or 14 hours a day, six days a week, year-round.

Largely because of the meatpacking plants, Iowa’s Latino population has swelled 63% in the 1990s, to about 53,000. The number of Latino schoolchildren has tripled in the last decade. Other groups also are settling in: Vietnamese, Bosnians, Pacific Islanders, a dozen nationalities spread out among the 30 or so Iowa towns with packing plants.

Even in this context of rapid demographic change, however, Postville stands out.

For one thing, it’s unusual to see immigrants from so many countries find their way to such a small town. Some ethnic groups are sparsely represented (there’s just one Nigerian, for example, and three Filipinas), but both the Mexican and Jewish communities are several hundred strong. There are so many immigrants from the former Soviet Union that the kosher slaughterhouse posts its safety warnings in Russian--along with English, Hebrew and Spanish.

Experts say it’s also rare to see thriving Jewish communities in rural Iowa, much less ultra-Orthodox communities.

With several dozen Jewish families, virtually all of them adherents of the Lubavich branch of Hasidism and many with six or eight children, Postville “is a very interesting little place,” said Mark Grey, an anthropologist at the University of Northern Iowa who has studied the town. “It’s really taken on a different flavor.”

Aaron Rubashkin, who bought the slaughterhouse to supply fresh meat to his kosher store in New York, never explained why he settled on Postville. His son Shalom, who now helps run the plant, can say only that “divine providence” must have guided him here.

When the slaughterhouse first opened in 1990, the Rubashkins and the rabbis they hired commuted from New York, St. Paul, Miami and other cities with established Jewish populations. But that got wearying. So a few years ago, they committed to Postville. They set up a synagogue. They converted a former hospital into a Jewish school. They bought homes and assured their friends that, no, they weren’t crazy.

They forgot just one thing: to explain themselves to the community.

Differences Give Rise to Misperceptions

The Jews were quickly pegged as snobby because they wouldn’t eat in the local pizza joint (it wasn’t kosher) or greet their neighbors warmly (among the Lubavich, men don’t shake hands with women and women don’t shake hands with men). They were thought odd because their little boys all have such long hair (by tradition, it can’t be cut until age 3) and because the women all wear wigs (they cover their natural hair out of modesty).

Plus, there were cultural differences that have nothing to do with religion. These Jews were big-city bustlers, fast talkers who didn’t adapt right away to the slower pace of small-town life. (They even locked their cars! This, in a town where people leave their motors running while they stroll down Lawler Street doing errands.)

Shoshana Goldsmith, who moved here from Los Angeles with her husband and five children, well remembers how long it took her to acclimate: “When I first got here, I thought, ‘When is Sunday going to be over?’ It always seemed like Sunday because it was so quiet. Their idea of traffic is eight cars at the four-way intersection.”

In time, however, Goldsmith and her Jewish friends grew to love the measured tempo of Postville. Locals began to relax as well.

The newspaper recruited a Jewish woman to write a regular column explaining Hasidic customs. Kids of all religions started playing together--when four boys would gather for a game of basketball, like as not one or two of them would be wearing yarmulkes.

Most important, the kosher plant, AgriProcessors, was doing well by Postville’s economy. Graveyard shifts kept the plant humming 18 hours a day, with rabbis killing up to 35,000 chickens and 350 cows a day and sending them through assembly lines to be cleaned and packaged. The workers shopped in town, boosting local merchants. They also spurred development in a town that had long been stagnant. Three dozen apartments have been built in the last two years, and 15 new houses are planned.

“You could say the quality of life here has deteriorated if you liked a small, sleepy town,” Mayor John Hyman said, “but there has been economic betterment.”

There also has been a cultural exchange, of sorts. Townsfolk like to boast that they taught Jews new to homeownership how to care for their lawns and shovel their walks. A brand-new kosher restaurant, meanwhile, has hooked some local farmers on matzo ball soup.

Shulamis Jenkelowitz, who runs the restaurant and a kosher deli, encourages her employees to hand out samples to introduce locals to Middle Eastern fare such as tabbouleh, hummus and falafel. She no longer needs to give samples of her homemade challah; the deli sells 60 to 70 pounds of the bread each Friday, mostly to non-Jewish residents. (Similarly, farm families snatch up much of the Russian bread sold in the local tearoom.)

Despite these gains, tension persists.

Spanish-speaking immigrants, many of whom live in a beat-up trailer park on the fringe of town, seem to have had the toughest time integrating into Postville society.

“They don’t like Mexicans,” concluded Santiago Flores, a 19-year-old immigrant who puts in 65 hours a week at AgriProcessors. “The people here, they don’t know how to live with people who are different,” complained Navarro, the transplanted Californian.

Lila Nobles would agree.

She’s white and a native of Postville. But she stayed away for 15 years after marrying a black man, convinced no one here would accept him.

Nobles came back recently because she heard the town had changed. Her husband, Calvin, who works at AgriProcessors, insists he’s happy here, although he’s one of only three or four blacks. “I haven’t had too much trouble,” he explained.

But Nobles is on edge. Their children have been taunted with racial slurs. And she always feels as though people are staring. Yes, she and her husband have made some good friends. Overall, however, she’s disappointed in her hometown.

“People’s minds have expanded, but not to the point where they’re really open-minded.”

Longtime Residents Remain Distant

Although overt acts of racism are rare, community leaders say most old-time Postvillians cope with the changes in their beloved town by staying aloof. “A few of us, maybe 10%, intermingle and get along well,” newspaper editor Sharon Drahn said. “The rest coexist.”

To nudge some of the holdouts into appreciating--or, at the very least, acknowledging--the town’s diversity, the Chamber of Commerce sponsored a Taste of Postville festival last summer. Under a cheery striped tent, more than 1,000 people sampled foods from 15 ethnic groups, from German potato salad to Filipino eggrolls to Mexican tamales to Ukranian borscht.

Other, less formal forums for integration also have emerged. Take, for example, Hall Roberts’ living room.

Roberts, a seed company executive who has lived in Postville all his life, has stacked his living room with hundreds of computer games and the snazziest Nintendo technology. Language barriers don’t matter here; every adolescent boy understands the bam-bang-kaboom of the latest Star Wars game. By 4 p.m., when Roberts returns home from work, up to a dozen immigrant kids are lined up at his front door.

In the evenings, their parents come too, asking Roberts for help finding a Guatemalan newspaper on the Internet or writing a letter in English using his translation software. A devout Protestant, Roberts has nonetheless affixed a mezuzah, a miniature scroll inscribed with a portion of the Torah, to his door so even Orthodox Jews will feel welcome.

“A lot of the older people in Postville, bless their souls, can’t bear to see anyone [unfamiliar] in this community,” Roberts said. “But I’ve been very excited by it.”

The way Roberts sees it, immigration is an old story, even in Postville: “They’ve forgotten,” he said of the anti-diversity crowd, “that in the old days of this town, the Germans couldn’t stand to see Norwegians here.”