The Road To Sonoma
Driving the rocky Northern California coast has always required caution. The views of the ocean from the two narrow lanes of Highway One are spectacular, but the blind turns and steep drop to the jagged rocks below make for a treacherous journey.
My grandfather used to drive this road constantly, a perilous journey that mirrored the daily animosities faced by NoCal’s immigrant Jewish population. He was a Jew who moved his family to Sonoma County from New York City in the late 1940’s. At the time, he was the only board-certified cardiologist in that part of the state. Since there were no emergency rooms in the area’s small-town hospitals, he would leave his home in Santa Rosa and drive the old coastal road to make house calls. Sometimes, he’d range up to Fort Bragg and Mendocino. Other times it would be just down the road to Petaluma and the small hamlets along the Russian River.
On these more local trips he treated an exiled people living a lifestyle unchanged from the “Old Country.” When there was no school, my grandmother used to make my mother and her sisters go along, to ensure my grandfather didn’t fall asleep while navigating the narrow country roads. He would pull in to the White Russian communities near the coast, and his patients there would come out to greet him dressed in traditional Slavic robes and hats. The “Whites” were on the losing side of the Russian Revolution, fighting against the “Red” Bolshevik forces that would go on to found the U.S.S.R.
Among the exiles he treated were the Russian Jews of Petaluma. They’d arrived in the wake of the Revolution during the 1920s, coming to America to buy inexpensive land and raise chickens, and their ranks included many socialists who strongly supported a communist Russia. By the time my grandfather started treating patients in Petaluma, the post-war Jewish community there had grown to include both Holocaust survivors and American-born Jews from Southern California and the East Coast. The changing face of Jewish Petaluma during this era, and the poultry industry that fueled its rise, is examined in Bonnie Burt and Judy Montell’s documentary, A Home On The Range: The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma.
One of the themes explored in the film is how certain anti-Semitic and anti-labor sentiments of Depression-era California sometimes combined to produce ugly episodes like the 1935 tarring-and-feathering of two Jewish union organizers in Santa Rosa. Such intolerance lingered on through the western migrations that followed the Second World War.
When my grandfather first moved to the area in 1947, many of his neighbors had never seen an East Coast Jew before. While most of the response to his creed was friendly, he was also approached by a group of men with other intentions. They told him to clear out, or there would be trouble. My grandfather had survived quite a few scrapes, so when his wife asked him what they should do about the threat, he responded simply, “get a gun.”
And that was it. He never heard from the men again - a sign that the power of vigilantism in the area had waned because of the sheer persistence of new arrivals. When my grandfather passed away a few years back, winemaking had long ago become Sonoma’s iconic product. But driving those old coastal roads recalls a time when local Jews ignored threats and made chicken king.
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