At Home In Utopia is a movie based around an apartment complex. The 2008 documentary, directed by Michal Goldman, tells the story of a cooperative housing venture started by Jewish garment workers in the 1920s in the Bronx.
The film will screen April 27 as part of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival.
Utopia is not actually about a cluster of brick buildings, but rather a history of the politics of Jewish workers in the first half of the 20th century told from a very personal place: Their homes.
The United Workers Cooperative Colony, or “the Coops” as the complex was known, is presented, predominantly, through interviews with its oldest surviving residents — specifically, people who were children when the buildings were first constructed and whose parents were founding investors.
Now in their 70s and 80s, these former residents of the Coops remember the home of their childhood as a place where everyone was of a similar mind politically and culturally.
“When I was little, I assumed the whole world was communist — and certainly the whole world was Jewish,” recalls one interviewee in the opening scenes of the film.
The Coops was the brainchild of a group of Jewish labor organizers who wanted to provide better living conditions for New York’s immigrant Jewish worker population which lived, by and large, in crowded, depressed urban tenements. In 1925, founders began selling shares to workers in what would become, at the time, the largest apartment complex in the United States, designed to house more than 700 families.
The film presents Jewish labor politics of the 1920s as being heavily imbued with enthusiasm for Communism, both in the United States and worldwide. The Coops were envisioned as a place of equality and communal ownership. Hammer and sickle images decorate the buildings’ entryways. The complex was advertised as “a fortress for the working class against its enemies” by a New York Yiddish-language Communist newspaper.
Interviewees recall being pulled out of school to attend May Day parades and, as they grew older, pressed into service as labor organizers. The adults they describe looking up to as kids were the most politically vocal and aggressive. These images of entire families rallying behind the same causes with their neighbors are inspiring to watch, even when some of those fights have long since faded in the American consciousness.
The visions presented in At Home in Utopia are inevitably distorted, however. The reason is easy enough to find: Most of those interviewed recall a place of childhood. Few who appear in the film stayed in the Coops beyond their early 20s, and it’s these aggrandized childhood memories that makes the place sound like utopia.
That’s not to say the version of the Coops as presented in At Home in Utopia is not an accurate one, or even if it is inaccurate, that there isn’t still value in its retelling.
Changes started coming to the Coops in the 1940s. As the years went on, the priorities of the Coops continued to remain based largely upon the political views on which they were founded, but the issues at hand inevitably shifted. Coops residents became less concerned with being a “fortress for the working class” and more a vanguard for equality. To that end, the board began actively encouraging a number of African American families to move into the complex.
A few interviewees recall some contention among their parents about the decision to diversify the Coops, since they had been built specifically for Jewish workers. Once families from outside of the Jewish community began to move in, if anyone had trouble getting along, any memory was erased in the fuzzy glow of hindsight. Instead, former residents remember the Coops as one of the only places in New York at the time where black kids played with Jewish kids and families mingled, leaving their front doors open for whatever pack of youngsters might come barging in.
Former Coops kid Boris Ourlicht tells the story of taking Livy Dickerson, one of his black neighbors, out on a date, and promptly being pulled over by a suspicious police officer.
“I guess I was nuts or naïve,” Ourlicht recalls while explaining that he never imagined he and Dickerson would be hassled by anyone outside of the Coops when inside the community their courtship was met with complete acceptance.
Ourlicht and Dickerson refused to be bullied by the outside world though, and as adults the couple married in an era when interracial families were still almost unheard of.
It is here, with stories like Ourlicht’s, that At Home in Utopia really shines — in its personal histories, rather than statements of fact. Viewers will likely find themselves most moved by the ways in which living in an almost exclusively Jewish and uniquely politically active community shaped those who grew up there. After all, what stories can anyone really tell about their own childhoods, expect how they personally emerged from them?
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