Oregon Field Notes, August 1991
Daniel J. Elazar
This is my first visit to Oregon in 25 years and my first
opportunity to concentrate on Oregon alone. In August 1959 I
drove north from the California border through Ashland, Medford,
detouring to Crater Lake and then up the Willamette Valley
through Eugene and Salem to Portland, and on into Washington.
Five years later in 1964, my wife and I drove into eastern Oregon
from Idaho just west of Boise, up the eastern side of the state
to Pendleton, Boardman, and Hermiston, then westward along the
Columbia River through the Columbia River gorge to Portland and
southward through the Willamette Valley into California. This
trip my wife, youngest son and I fly into Portland, drive
eastward through the Columbia River gorge, southward along the
eastern slope of the Cascades, then into the mountains at Mt.
Hood, southward again to Bend, and into the mountains to Crater
Lake, then back to Bend, across the Cascades to Salem, from Idaho just west of Boise, up the eastern side of the state
to Pendleton, Boardman, and Hermiston, then westward along the
Columbia River through the Columbia River gorge to Portland and
southward through the Willamette Valley into California.
This
trip my wife, youngest son and I fly into Portland, drive
eastward through the Columbia River gorge, southward along the
eastern slope of the Cascades, then into the mountains at Mt.
Hood, southward again to Bend, and into the mountains to Cratersit and move on. Their great fear is
Californians. Their attitude toward Californians is something
like Coloradans attitude toward Texans, only perhaps even more so
because California is closer and even more threatening. It
almost seems that they have an industry of encouraging
Californians to move on to Washington.
Oregon is a very beautiful and diverse state, with one of the
most beautiful coast lines in the United States and maybe even in
the world, lush hills and valleys, a mountain range punctured by
spectacular snow peaks, a miniature Great Plains, a mighty river,
wine country, cow country, farm country, pretty cities, good
universities, some natural wonders, and one of the country's
oldest Shakespeare festivals. The state also has a literate,
progressive, and predominantly moralistic citizenry. In fact,
once again it reminds me of a western version of Minnesota.
This is true even in its negatives: slightly slow, combining the
slowness of Scandinavians with the rather deliberately relaxed
quality (commitment to being relaxed) of the Pacific coast. There
is a certain kind of insularity more or less reflecting a belief
that they have it all so why should they be concerned about
anywhere else.
My conclusion after a few days was that Orgonians are nice but
perverse in a certain way. They do the unexpected for no
apparent reason and without making a deal of it. One example:
driving southward on Interstate 405 through downtown Portland,
the last downtown exit is very poorly marked and quite confusing.
Many people apparently miss it. The next exit is several miles
down the pike and cars are usually lined up to get off of it, but
there is no clear way to turn around to get back on the freeway.
One has to turn east, go across the freeway, and then there is a
side street that comes in at an angle so that the point of
junction with the major street is quite wide. There is a sign
"U-turns permitted." Cars line up to make the U-turn so they
will be able to reenter the expressway. The city has obviously
calculated this, rather than setting up a formal left turn
possibility properly controlled for traffic.
I could multiply examples in every field. One hardly hears a
raised voice in Oregon. People are very pleasant. But at times
they can drive one crazy in their rigidity, unwillingness to bend
or to consider the specifics of a situation. They have a rule;
they follow it, with a smile, but like robots. It is clear that
rules are very important and are made to be observed at all
costs.
Portland
Portland remains a very lovely city. I would still put it among
the five best examples of the American model city, like
Minneapolis, St. Paul, Seattle and Denver, a city set in a park
or garden, with the especially rich green of Oregon forests. It
has done very well to preserve its downtown, even preserving a
1920-50s-style theater row. At the same time many attractive new
buildings have been built and there has been a good synthesis of
the old and the new, including riverfront recreational and
residential development downtown.
The heart of the city is still along the Willamette rather than
the Columbia, but the airport is along the Columbia so there is
new commercial, industrial and recreational development along
that river as well. Following its geography, Portland has five
sides: northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest, and north. The
north side is where the poor underclass lives which is becoming
problematic with drug-based gang wars exploding for the first
time. Portland has not had gangs in the past or the random
violence that they bring. Now it has, confined to the north
side, but who knows for how long. Portlanders are quite worried
about this for obvious reasons. It is like the serpent in the
garden. The southwest side is the most affluent, then the
northwest. The two sides to the east of the Willamette are both
for middle class working people.
Both Oregon and Portland are small enough so that Portland is not
detached from the state as a whole. Quite to the contrary, it
remains the state's urban center and its newspaper, The
Oregonian, circulates throughout the whole state and serves as a
statewide newspaper.
While the state capital remains in Salem, it is clear that a good
deal of state business is conducted in Portland. The State
Historical Society and its museum and bookshop have moved up to
Portland to be pro-active with a lot of outreach. The Society
has an excellent bookstore of works from Oregon and the West.
Like Minnesota, Oregon takes its history very seriously, with the
added seriousness of the Far West. In general, Portland seems to
have many bookstores, if not as many as Seattle, still, above
average.
Portland and Oregon have undergone the "sophistication" that one
sees throughout the United States. The wine industry has
expanded and Oregon wines are now quite good and served
everywhere. Good restaurants have multiplied. Resort areas of
various kinds have developed along the coast and in the mountains
and tourism is a big industry. The Columbia Gorge is now viewed
as a recreation area rather than as a source of cheap electric
power which is taken for granted. Thirty years ago the symbolic
meaning of the Columbia Gorge lay in the great dams that brought
federal power to the people. Now its symbol is wind-surfing.
Looking at the civil scape of Oregon, one is forcefully reminded
that the state was settled in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s as the
same time as much of Illinois, Wisconsin, and southeastern
Minnesota. Its towns look like midwestern transplants from that
period. They are actually implants rather than transplants, as
indigenous to Oregon as their counterparts are to Illinois. More
than any other western state, Oregon looks like the Midwest with
mountains. Even the patterns of decay and reconstruction are the
same. Indeed, because Oregon has not encouraged in-migration and
development beyond the minimum, it has retained many of the same
physical characteristics in its cities and towns that one finds
in Illinois or Iowa, unlike Washington or California where there
either were no such older traces or, if they existed, they have
been obliterated by the inundations of subsequent development.
But Oregon is unique in having that early period of settlement, a
whole generation of Americans arriving before the Civil War,
something that is true of no other mountain or Pacific state.
This is reenforced by the fact that the Willamette Valley, the
Oregon heartland, is a lowlands, and in any case is not even as
many feet above sea level as what we think of as the lowlying
Illinois prairies.
The moralistic political culture remains predominant in the
state's heartland while its southern reaches -- around Medford
and Ashland -- seem to have had reinforcement of the
individualistic political culture and the Oregon coast, which is
growing in population, seems to be a MI mix. East of the
Cascades political culture seems to be M with a little bit of I.
The Oregon coast has become an attractive recreational site and
it is beautiful. The state has managed to preserve approximately
half of it in public ownership and the decline of the lumber
industry which has little serious consequences economically has
helped to reduce environmental deterioration. For example,
Tillamook, once a heavy industrial area because of the logging
industry, now has a quiet tranquility about it and the 3,000 foot
mountains rising out of the Pacific to its north are wreathed in
clouds almost like tropical peaks. In fact it is the most
tropical scene I think I have ever seen in the United States, but
the Pacific waters are freezing cold and the area itself has an
unmistakably full four season climate. Unfortunately, the price
of that is that the city of Tillamook is depressed except insofar
as it has captured tourist trade, which it has not done so well
because the older industrial base has left its scars and the
tourists seek better beaches to the north and the south.
Oregon's mountains are unique among American mountain ranges
because of the way in which the main range of the Cascades is
only 4-5,000 feet above sea level, but is punctuated every 40 or
50 miles by a 10,000 footer, give or take 1,000 feet, that is
snow-capped from 6,500 feet up, each a dormant volcano, hence,
completely conical in shape. What this means is that there are
large areas for fishing and hiking recreation but only so much
"scenery," although it is very beautiful in its own way. Crater
Lake remains a very impressive jewel in the Cascades, of course
well-maintained by the National Park Service.
This means that the Cascades are principally used for the kind of
forest and lake recreation that one finds in Minnesota, only
2-3,000 feet higher in Oregon. It is a very different kind of
recreation than one finds in Colorado, for example, where
mountain climbing, white water rafting, and horseback riding are
more appropriate. Here we have fishing, boating and hiking.
Mt. Hood, at well over 11,000 feet, is the highest peak in the
state. It was also the closest major peak to Portland so it is
the primary mountain recreation area in the state, an hour and a
half away from the city. Its western slopes are covered with
summer homes and resorts, housing skiers in the ski season and
golfers and swimmers in the summer. One can drive around Mt.
Hood on forest roads and get intimately close to its 5,000 feet
of snow-capped cone, or drive up to Timberline Lodge at the 6,000
foot level on the mountainside to the ski area. It is a
picturebook mountain in every respect.
South of Mt. Hood and a thousand feet lower is Mt. Jefferson and
south of it down another thousand feet, Mt. Washington. The only
"concentration" of snow-capped peaks is just west of Bend, a
"family" of five peaks dominated by the Three Sisters.
(Incidentally, the weather was clear enough so that by the end of
the trip we had seen the entire range, from Mt. Rainier in
Washington on the north southward to Mt. Shasta in California.)
The plains to the east of the Cascades are wheat and cattle
country. Just south of Mt. Hood in the foothills is the Warm
Springs Indian Reservation of confederated tribes. It has
benefited from logging and mining money which has been well used.
The seat of its government is Warm Springs but it has a major
regional resort at Kahneeta Hot Springs. Apparently this is an
Indian confederacy that works, that is to say, working as such
today.
Because of its more classically western character, the area
around Bend, Redmond and Sisters is horse country and also has
tried to foster a somewhat ersatz western myth. Sisters, for
example, has redone itself as a cutesy western cow town which is,
at best, semi-justified by history, but it has been done
attractively as Oregonians would do something like that. The
whole area was settled in the 1880s, much later than Oregon to
the west of the Cascades, and the railroad did not reach Bend
until 1911, so this is a "last frontier" region of the
continental U.S.
The Jews of Oregon
When I added them up, it turned out that I had far more
acquaintances in Portland than I thought. Arden and Lois Shenker
were our principal contacts. He is perhaps the major figure in
the local Jewish community and president of the National Jewish
Community Relations Advisory Council. Reuben Lenske, just 92 in
July, is the last surviving member of the first graduating class
of the Minneapolis Talmud Torah, still active in his real estate
business though he has retired from law practice. He gave me a
copy of a short memoir he wrote on the Talmud Torah. Rabbi
Joshua Stampfer is rabbi of the city's large Conservative
congregation. He is very concerned with crypto-Jews around the
world. His son, Shaul, is presently directing the Steinsaltz
Yeshiva in Moscow. Alan Abarbanel, an attorney, is the founder
of the Abarbanel Family Association and publisher of its
newsletter. Rabbi Emmanuel Rose is the rabbi of the Reform
temple. We were at Camp Sharon-Avodah together in 1950.
Portland now is estimated to have 12-15,000 Jews. There are
congregations in Salem and Eugene as well. In Salem, the Jews
are primarily state government employees and in Eugene primarily
University of Oregon faculty. A Jewish community is developing
along the coast especially in Cannon City and north. They have a
new congregation in that area at Sea Beach but it does not have a
building.
There we have another connection, Sammy Mirviss from the
Minneapolis Mirviss family, who went to Hollywood as Michael
Loring in the 1920s, then became hazan in Fresno, California, and
is now 81 and has retired to Cannon Beach where he had a son (who
died of AIDS this year) and is now leading services for that
congregation. His brother Jack who lives in Kibbutz Urim and is
now in his 91st year comes every year to be the hazan at High
Holiday services in Portland to be with his brother-in-law Reuben
Lenske.
Jews have been in Oregon for a long time. It seems that both
Arden and Lois Shenker's families have been in the state for more
than a hundred years. Arden's great grandfather came across the
plains on a covered wagon to Portland in 1880, a few years before
the city was connected with the East by rail, so he is fourth
generation in the state and his children have already established
the fifth generation.
Nevertheless, the change in the situation of the Jews in this
generation is becoming apparent. However much they were part of
the community in the past, there were still barriers which
prevented very extensive intermarriage. Now those barriers have
dropped and the Shenker children are following the prevailing
pattern. The one who is staying in Portland and who is most
interested in pursuing service to the Jewish community as a
career has married a non-Jewish woman who has converted and is
seriously Jewish, observing kashrut, Shabbat and holidays. The
boy, Josh, wears a kippah. Another son who lives in
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, has married a non-Jewish woman who
has not converted but who is active in the Jewish community. She
is the program chairman for the local community relations council
and was responsible for arranging an appearance by Arden in his
capacity as President of NJCRAC. While interested, she still is
not planning to convert. The same is true with a daughter who
was about to get married the next week. She was marrying a
non-Jewish man who was also not planning to convert, though they
were going to "raise their children as Jews." All three children
are seriously Jewish by American standards, but all three have
married out and only one has brought a spouse into the fold.
Portland used to be at the end of the world Jewishly. Now,
however, the world has changed. Arden Shenker is President of a
major national Jewish organization. Joshua Stampfer is one of
the more active and better known American Conservative rabbis
involved throughout the world, especially in the Soviet Union,
and his son even more so. Manny Rose plays some kind of
significant role in the Reform movement. And even a relative
outsider like Allan Abarbanel has created a worldwide family
network from his Portland office.
Moreover, people are beginning to come through. Larry Rubin, the
Executive Director of NJCRAC, came out to work with Arden while I
was there and we had dinner together. The list of well-known
Jewish leaders who come to speak or otherwise appear is growing.
The Portland-Israel connection is not insignificant. Quite a few
Portlanders live in Israel and those who are Jewishly interested
do spend time as young students or later on missions in the
Jewish state.
The Portland Jewish community has a day school but it is
apparently not very strong. There is a Portland Talmud Torah
which remains the focal point of whatever Jewish education most
Portland Jewish youth obtain. It is an old Talmud Torah that has
undergone some reorganization in recent years. As in
Minneapolis, it has in a sense blocked the development of a
community day school.
