From 1935 until his death in 1941, my grandfather, Boruch Chaim Cassel, edited a monthly bulletin called “The Keidaner,” a publication of his landsmanshaft, or immigrants’ club. The Keidaner Association of New York began in 1900, like all such groups, as a mutual-aid society. Its members, recently arrived in the U.S., helped each other find housing, jobs and business connections, and chipped in to provide rudimentary health and welfare benefits for those in need.

Yet Keidan, the town they left behind in Lithuania, was never forgotten, and as the immigrants grew older, established careers and families in the new land, memories of the alte heym served as a bond, anchoring the Keidaners in a rapidly changing world.

The pages of The Keidaner were where they shared and preserved these memories. Each month, in addition to notices of meetings, dues and family events, bulletin articles recalled scenes and stories from Keidan fun amol – from a time gone by. B. Cassel, as editor and club historian, authored many of these pieces, almost always in the Keidaners’ native Yiddish.  Although no copies were left among his papers after he died, several Jewish archives collected editions of The Keidaner, enabling me, 50 years later, to rediscover my grandfather’s writing and to begin translating and republishing them.

I am not a trained historian, but I believe these bulletins offer a valuable window into the lives of an immigrant generation, and the Eastern European world they left behind, which vanished tragically only a few decades later.