the story of a young woman who, yearning to become a religious scholar, disguises herself as a boy and enrolls in a yeshiva. Though never an ardent feminist in the traditional sense, Kael, more than most critics at the time, liked Yentl and particularly responded to Streisand’s portrayal of the title character, “who runs her fingers over books as if they were magic objects.”
Judith eventually married Isaac Kael, born in Pruszków on August 18, 1883. Isaac’s family background was not nearly as elevated as Judith’s, which appears to have been a source of conflict between them for much of their married life, as Judith grew increasingly resentful of being consigned to the role of housewife and mother.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more than two million Jews, a great number of them from Russia and Poland, arrived on American shores. Isaac emigrated to the United States in 1903, with Judith following two years later; Isaac’s younger brother Philip (who married one of Judith’s sisters) would join them in 1907. They settled into the epicenter of New York’s Jewish ghetto—the grim, poverty- and disease-ridden slums of Hester Street, where Jewish peddlers shoved their pushcarts up and down the dirty streets, hawking fish, meat, household items, novelties. Isaac made a living by selling caps. Within a short time the couple started a family: Louis, born February 27, 1906, and Philip, born May 12, 1909. The chilly disposition that Judith showed later in life may have had its roots in the miserable experience of these difficult early years in New York. Soon the family sought out a healthier place to live, with greater opportunities. The Kaels did eventually manage to live for a brief time in the Catskills town of Mountain Dale, New York, where their third child, Annie, was born on September 23, 1912.
For some time Isaac and Judith had been aware of a thriving community of Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma, a picturesque town in Sonoma County, California. In 1904 a Lithuanian named Sam Melnick had settled there and gained a foothold as its first Jewish poultry farmer. Once word of Melnick’s success got around—thanks in large part to articles and advertisements in The Jewish Daily Forward, the most widely read Yiddish daily newspaper in America—many Jewish immigrants made the trek westward.
The decision of the Kaels to become part of this Jewish community had no particular religious motivation; both Isaac and Judith had been and would remain highly secular Jews. But in Petaluma they would have the chance to live among their own people in what sounded like a beautiful setting, with plenty of fresh air and room for the children to play. They also knew that in a farming community, poor people almost always have an easier time coming by food than they do in the city. So in 1912, along with Judith’s parents and Isaac’s brother Philip, the Kaels packed up their belongings and headed to California.
In 1912 Petaluma, which lies thirty-five miles north of San Francisco, was a tiny town—its population was around 7,500—surrounded by rolling hills and sprawling dairy farms with signs hawking farm-fresh eggs and milkshakes. With its dirt roads and hitching posts and frame houses, it seemed to belong to the Old West more than to the twentieth century.
In 1878, a Canadian named Lyman C. Byce had arrived in Petaluma, and soon began raising poultry there. In 1879, he and Isaac Dias invented the first egg incubator, which revolutionized the poultry industry. Farmers could produce a far greater number of chicks, and business began to boom. Ranches sprang up that eventually developed the capacity to produce anywhere from 100,000 to 1.8 million eggs annually. The Petaluma Valley became dotted with stock and poultry feed mills, egg-packing plants, and box factories. At the railroad station was a sign depicting an enormous hen sitting on a stack of eggs that trumpeted Petaluma’s sobriquet “The Egg Basket of the World.”
On their arrival the Kaels moved into a two-story house at 219 Fifth Street, until Isaac found a nine-acre farm five miles west of town, near Middle Two Rock Road. On the property was a large frame house, with a couple’s house and bunkhouse out back. The Kaels got their poultry business off the ground with a flock of white Leghorns. As was the case with most Jewish immigrants in the area, their lack of experience wasn’t much of an obstacle. Maintaining a chicken ranch wasn’t overly complicated and didn’t require a huge initial outlay of cash,