Amalgam: An Immigrant, His Labor Union, and His American Family in Brooklyn

Amalgam is a big book, reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, as the cover is substantial and the pages are thick. Though Jetter’s book is not long, it has heft, as it needs to, given that it covers decades and is, on one level, telling the story of America in the twentieth century. The cover looks like an old door, one that seems solidly built, but that also contains years of history, and invites the reader discover what lies within.

As Jetter’s subtitle reveals, the book centers around Abe Goldstein, who came to America from Poland; worked as a pocket maker, was a member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and raised his family in New York. As the title reveals, though, nothing is as straightforward as it seems, as people and history are combinations — amalgams — of a wide variety of ideas, behaviors, and backgrounds.

The book itself is an amalgam, not only of words and text (as all graphic works are), but of a variety of styles and techniques. Jetter explains that process in an end section titled “The Making of Amalgam,” where she lays out the twelve years she and others took to create this work. The images are a variety of prints, mostly linoleum cuts, but there are also lithographs, all printed by Justin Sanz (with assistance from Ian Harkey and Faye Blue at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop). She even had the font carved in linoleum. Each page then is often a dense full-page work, with multiple layers of images and text placed side-by-side to a page of text that resembles a poem. At one point, Jetter mentions her cousin Len, who gave her The Golden Encyclopedia of Art; she references work by George Grosz and Käthe Kollwitz, who serve as inspirations, especially Kollwitz.

There’s not much of a plot, as the book is more of a meditation on Jetter's grandfather and the America he knew. Abe is dedicated to the labor movement, striving diligently to get workers more rights. At one point, he threw acid on cloth to try to prevent them from having to work seven days a week. He led strikes and protests, ultimately helping the union make great strides in the 1910s and '20s. However, he was also a dictatorial presence in his family, preventing freedom and enjoyment in his own home. As Jetter describes him, he was “a factory dissident fighting for human rights/an authoritarian patriarch fighting against them.” In fact, he didn’t allow his children to have toys, hiding the ones that came as gifts from other family members. He only allowed reading in measured doses, believing that it could ultimately harm the children’s vision.

Like many immigrant families at the time, Jetter’s brood mainly lived in one large home, and spanned at least three generations. Unlike other families though, there were no doors on any of the rooms. "Privacy was not a word in our grandfather’s vocabulary,” Jetter comments in an understatement. The description of life in the house at first sounds intolerable, especially to most twenty-first century readers living in houses as large as Jetter’s but only for a handful of people. However, Jetter juxtaposes two pages to show the richness of her life there. On the first, a sideways spread entirely in black-and-white, the reader sees the doors off the hinges and lying on the floor, a train set that has to be disassembled for parties, canned food in the pantry, and stacks of hand-me-downs from their cousins. On the next, though, she recreates the previous spread, but overlays it with colorful images of her family members, food from the parties, and several of the hand-me-downs. The next page only shows her family members, connected by hinges, followed by a page with only the text, “We were hinged to each other.” Jetter makes it clear that, though there are downsides to being in a family without any privacy, there are also clear benefits.

The union also has a combination of victories and defeats, ultimately ending when it dissolves. After a three-month strike, they won a fifty-hour work week for their members, working together to achieve what they couldn’t on their own. Jetter describes the union as “a mixture, a blend – / ‘a curious amalgam of the individual and the group;’ / ‘a curious amalgam of the pragmatic and the visionary.’” However, Jetter also shows the struggles unions have had in America. She flashes back to the 1892 strike at The Homestead Steel Mill, owned by Andrew Carnegie, which Henry Clay Frick brutally crushed. After they defeated the union, Carnegie instituted severe working conditions, including a cut in pay and twelve-hour workdays. Jetter points out the complicated legacy of Carnegie, though, as he became a philanthropist, working to give away most, if not all, of his money before he died, including establishing branch libraries throughout New York. Jetter then gives a quick overview of The Wagner Act in 1935, which protects unions, and The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which amended that act, significantly limiting unions’ powers. In an epilogue, Jetter draws attention to the recent unionizing endeavors of workers at Amazon and Starbucks, reminding readers that unions are still working to provide employees with fair working conditions, despite the efforts to destroy them in the previous century.

Jetter provides this background information to convey how America itself was an amalgam at the time, especially when it comes to immigration. Abe and his family came to America from Poland and worked hard and succeeded, often in spite of the situations in which they found themselves. Abe and his wife Eva become citizens in 1917, becoming, as Jetter writes, “part of the mixture; the blend that embodied their new country.” Her description sounds like the idealized view of the melting pot that people have used to describe America for decades; however, the reality in the early part of the twentieth century was far from ideal. Just two weeks before they became citizens Congress overrode Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the Immigration Act of 1917, which imposed literacy tests on immigrants and banned the entry of people from Asia and the Middle East altogether. In 1924, Congress expanded that act, establishing quotas for Italians and Jews. America needed the immigrants for their growing economy in the 1920s, but, when they did let them in, they didn’t treat them well, and they only let certain people in.

The front pages of the book have images of pieces of doors, especially keyholes, and thread. Abe and his family’s success rests on these images. On the one hand, they needed a door to enter America and escape the growing Russian empire, which would conscript twelve-year-old Jewish boys for thirty-one-year tours. They also needed the work that the textile industry provided for not just Abe, but most of the family. However, they also needed the family that was hinged together in a country that was far from accepting of them. And America needed them to make it a better place, especially for the workers who came after them. America often closed the door that makes up the cover of this work, but Jetter’s work reminds readers that behind that door are people who not only need a place of safety, but an America that needs folks like Jetter’s ancestors to make it safe and strong for all. That’s an idea with heft, and Jetter has crafted a book with enough strength to carry it.

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