An Ex-Pat Looks Back

By Sally Koslow

Photo courtesy of NDSU Institute for Regional Studies (Digital Horizons)

Since I moved to New York City in 1970, whenever a stranger learns where I was born and raised, the response is as predictable as a shmear on a bagel: You’re the first person I’ve ever met from North Dakota. Manhattan has been my home for three times as long as I lived in the Flickertail state, where I have never knowingly seen a Flickertail, which I recently heard is a ground squirrel, not a bird. Nonetheless, my knee jerk response to seeing a map of the fifty states is to land first on the Upper Midwest rectangle bordered by Minnesota, Canada, Montana and that other, lesser Dakota. To many, North Dakota may seem like the state the country forgot. But as if it was a ticket for a Powerball drawing, I hold tight to my pedigree.

Perhaps my connection to the state stems from the gift that keeps on giving, frostbitten winters that inoculated me—as it does most residents—with an elixir composed of North Dakota Strong practicality, the Protestant work ethic, and an immunity to getting a swelled head. Whenever Easterners stop shivering enough to bemoan their thermometer dipping to, say, a balmy 29, I puff myself up with righteous memories of my childhood when for a month straight the temperature never broke zero--and this was before the wind chill factor was invented. I choose to disregard that a wide swath of my Fargo friends now spend winter in the Arizona dessert. They avoid Florida and its noisy Easterners whom they suspect see Upper Midwesterners as the bacon and eggs in a Denny’s grand slam breakfast of a joke.

People who live in the other forty-nine states inevitably wonder how anyone endures North Dakota’s November-to-May Siberia, not realizing that the weather is simply a non-negotiable fact of life like mega-mosquitoes, you betcha accents and despite our English teachers’ insistence on saying get not git, mangled sentence construction along the lines of You wanna come with? or Jeez, oh for fun. Nonetheless, I can’t overlook how many of my North Dakota memories involve the cold, and not just skating under starry nights, but coats or the lack there of.

There was never a Halloween when my costume wasn’t hidden under a bulky parka. At Fargo’s late, lamented Central High School--which went up in flames shortly before I graduated in 1966--we walked hat-less and coat-less across “Pneumonia Alley” to classes in an annex. A guest at my December wedding tells tales about Canadian tourists lounging ‘round the Holiday Inn indoor pool as if it were the Riviera and how local alpha males wore than flimsy trench coats in weather that made the tears on her eyelashes freeze. This was 1971, years before 3M introduced Thinsulate, the eighth wonder of the world.

My favorite winter coat recollection has nothing to do with men’s wear. Decades before swanning about in fur became a sin, whenever my parents entertained during the winter, women arrived in furs. My sister Betsy and I were charged with ferrying the coats to my parents’ bed. Once the festivities were in full swing, we went to town, trying on every coat. The cuddly end of the animal kingdom was well-represented in Persian lamb, broadtail, mouton, fox, beaver, muskrat, lynx, and various marsupials and weasels, from opossum to mink. (I never laid eyes on sable until I met my husband’s flashiest, blondest, Long Island aunt.)

That my parents lived in Fargo was almost an accident. As family lore goes, in his early twenties my father, Sam Platkin, left Brooklyn. This was 1938—give or take a year. A lefty at heart, he longed to join the Lincoln Brigade, a battalion of volunteers fighting with militants who opposed the Nazi-supported forces of General Francisco Franco in Spain’s civil war. With his family’s urging, however, Sam chose a more sedate Plan B: a move to California. Since to a Brooklyn boy Fargo was practically adjacent to Los Angeles (cue Saul Steinberg’s iconic View of the World illustration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue#/media/File:Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png ) along the way he disembarked from a California-bound train where his father’s older brother, his Uncle Jake, had settled in North Dakota.

In Bobrusk, a city in the province of Minsk—Czarist Russia then, Belarus now--where the Platkin family originated, Jake had been a cattle trader. In 1905 he followed the suggestion of an ad appealing to immigrants who knew the cattle trade to move to North Dakota. Four years later his brother Pesha, my grandfather, emigrated as well. The brothers tried—unsuccessfully—to become Bonanza farmers. Pesha, who Americanized his name to Phil, returned to New York, saying North Dakotans talked only about bulls, and became the owner of delicatessens.

By the time of Sam’s visit, Uncle Jake and his wife had been long established in North Dakota, where he worked in West Fargo’s stockyard. Sam told one of their sons, his cousin Matthew, about Cooper Union and its free tuition. Matthew enrolled to study architecture. This freed up a bedroom for Sam, a skilled dental technician, who found work in Fargo at the Welu Dental Laboratory.

Sam eventually made it to California, but not for 45 years, long after marrying my mother, Fritzie Hertz, a St. Paul girl and recent graduate of the University of Minnesota. My parents had three children: Dick , Betsy and me. We lived first on 11th Avenue South, where every winter puckish squirrels filled the gutters with walnuts from one of our trees and every summer tiger lilies and orange poppies bloomed in our backyard. The house was almost hidden behind a blue spruce nearly the height of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree that—to our neighbors’ disappointment—we didn’t decorate. Eventually my parents built a larger house on 19th Avenue South, where my dad transplanted a bed of lilies of the valley—my mother’s favorite-- from 11th Avenue and planted a small orchard of apple trees.

Fargo has become a city noted for its low-unemployment, affordable cost of living, excellent schools, welcoming attitude, and diversity. In fact, “Dakota” means “friend or ally” in the Lakota language. A wave of Vietnamese “boat people” arrived in the seventies. The “lost boys” of Sudan--victims of a civil war—in the 1980s. After that, immigrants from Bosnia and Croatia and, well, everywhere, settled in Fargo, lured by manufacturers, construction companies, and medical facilities that recognized the potential of recruiting foreign workers, as the cattle trade did years before with my great-uncle. Fargo’s public schools reflect this racial and ethnic diversity: about one-third of the students currently have Asian, Hispanic, African-American, Pacific Islander or Native American backgrounds.

It wasn’t always so. Despite the thousands of Native Americans living in the state, I recall no classmates who were indigenous people, and the first time I saw a Black person was on the Great Northern’s “Red River” train traveling to the Twin Cities. Back in the day—my day--if you were looking for diversity, “I” was it along with the rest of an enclave of about three-hundred Jews, a significant minority among the tall, blonde population whose grandparents had thick Norwegian accents. The “Frozen Chosen” community of my childhood has now mostly moved on, yet my sense of being from North Dakota is thoroughly meshed with belonging to this tightly knit circle of—to a certain degree--outliers.

There is an old Borscht Belt joke about a man whose town had two synagogues. “Why two?” a stranger asked. “There’s mine and the one I’d never set foot in.” This was Fargo, which had a small Orthodox “schul” that started in 1896 as well as Temple Beth-El, a Reform congregation formed by my parents’ generation around 1950 with a full-time rabbi, Hebrew and Sunday school, and a youth group that socialized with teenagers from Grand Forks, Bismarck, Minot, Devil’s Lake and other outposts of Judaism. ‘Twas a proud moment when I was crowned the B’nai B’rith Youth “Sweetheart” of North Dakota, as close as I will ever get to a tiara. The Fargo Hebrew Congregation disbanded in around 2000 but Temple Beth El—where I was married—lives on and is now also the home to St. Mark’s Lutheran Church.

I may know none of the current Temple members, yet if I activate my time machine, I see Fargo’s ghost Jews everywhere. When I attended my 50th high school reunion and made a pilgrimage to the pretty little Jewish cemetery near the airport, it felt like attending a performance of Thonton Wilder’s Our Town—there was Uncle Jake’s grave and not far away, my friend Marcy’s Bubbe and Zeyde and the final resting place of Bruce Latz, the owner of King Leo’s, local teenagers’ favorite hamburger joint. Strolling along Broadway I remembered when every other store was owned by Jewish retailers. Some establishments were non-eponymous, like the Liszt family’s Mary Elizabeth Shop, now the home of The Donaldson’s, a flophouse reincarnated as a hipster hotel, or McShanes, a snazzy gift shop owned by my father’s sister Ruth, who eventually settled in Fargo, and her husband Wayne Meyers. Some retailers named stores for their founders--Herbst, Levitz, Siegel, Sgutt, Shark, Mandel and Straus, whose German-born proprietor, Herman Stern, was the state’s Oscar Schindler, a remarkable hero who sponsored and saved 135 Jews from certain death by the Nazis.

My parents were content in Fargo, enjoying its summer nights ending at ten and cultural offerings thanks to three local colleges. My mom may have been the Public Library’s best customer and she also loved both Hadassah and her Fine Arts Club. Sam and Fritzie were enormously hospitable, involved in civic organizations and the opposite of pushy parents in all respects but one: an eagerness for their children to find Jewish partners. Most of their friends had a similar impulse. So, along with almost every other Jewish kid, we were exported, much like oil flowing out of the state. Dick studied at the University of Michigan; Betsy, Brandeis University, and I, the University of Wisconsin. None of us returned. Sociologist Debra Osnowitz, a product of Fargo and Grand Forks, refers to small Jewish communities who follow this pattern as “self-liquidating.”

My parents got what they wanted, because we all have Jewish spouses. Dick lives in Los Angeles, Betsy in Philadelphia, and I, Manhattan.

After college graduation I’d gotten a job offer from Mademoiselle. Had I known the magazine was owned by Conde Nast, the snootiest of publishers, I wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to apply there, but being from Fargo, I was clueless about the haughty reputation and reached out. Having spent my entire savings on a Europe on $5 a Day summer, when I went home to collect my typewriter and meager wardrobe, I had second thoughts about moving to New York. Maybe I should try to get a job at The Forum, the local newspaper where I’d interned for two summers, and save some money? Reader, my parents could not hustle me faster onto Northwest Airlines, afraid that if I’d stick around Fargo, I’d never leave. They were probably right. The only thing I’m sure of is that if I’d stayed I might own jumper cables and know what to do with them.

Though I left North Dakota, its influence has never left me: its fingerprints were all over my mother and father’s parenting, which was more in sync with the reserve of North Dakota Scandinavians than the effusive behavior attributed to cliché Jewish parents. Although he’s writing about Minnesota, my favorite Upper Midwestern author, Garrison Keillor, captures the philosophy of many North Dakota mothers and fathers I knew, including my own:

“The parents stood up and gave speeches praising the bride and groom so lavishly, it made me wonder if the couple had been diagnosed with a fatal disease. I’m from…where…parents do not speak admiringly of their children. Not lavishly anyway. They worry. They wonder if the marriage will last. They wonder if the guests are having a good time. In Minnesota, it’s hard to tell. Pride goeth before a fall and so my parents never praised me for fear it might lead to multiple felony indictments. They never bragged on us; it was good enough to be not bad.”

Was I raised before self-esteem was created? I won’t go that far, although I’ve occasionally thought that had I received, say, five percent of the praise some New York Jewish mothers showered on their daughters I’d have become so bloated with confidence I might have shot for a career as an astronaut.

Being raised in North Dakota has quietly served me well in the work I’ve enjoyed for the last 55 years. After Mademoiselle, I became an editor at Woman’s Day, wrote for many other magazines, and eventually became the editor-in-chief of McCall’s, one of the “Seven Sisters” magazines with jumbo circulations. Being from Fargo was the ideal background to inform my editorial decisions, offering an understanding of the values and priorities of the target reader, who I felt I knew. She was the adult version of my Camp Fire Girls friends, my classmates, and my potluck group. The reader was me. McCall’s happened to be owned by German companies, and my North Dakota background helped me understand the quirks of my bosses, whose behavior baffled some of my colleagues but to me was familiar; they struck me as upper midwestern Europeans.

When my magazine editing ending, I moved on to writing novels. My first book, Little Pink Slips, was inspired by my experience when McCall’s was handed over to the celebrity, Rosie O’Donnell. (Google it. I did not make this up.) My editor had only one reservation about the novel. “I don’t buy that a Jewish girl from Fargo could wind up as the editor-in-chief of a big women’s magazine.”

“Most of the book is pure fiction,” I explained, “but that detail is ripped from my own life.”

North Dakota or its thinly disguised substitute has crept into many of my books. There have now been seven.

“Magnolia Gold felt born to be a magazine editor,” I wrote in Little Pink Slips. “When she was growing up in Fargo, magazines had given her a window into a world where people watched indie movies, wore clothes paraded on red carpets, and referred to Donatella Versace as if she were their college roommate.”

When Magnolia visits North Dakota after years in New York she finds “the whole town was getting subversively trendy. Loft condos had sprouted where pawn shops used to be. A patisserie stood next to a tractor factory rehabbed into a sleek, postmodern office building. Where were the endless freight trains, whose cars she’d counted as a child, trains that dissected Fargo four times a day and made traffic…come to a standstill?”

At the character’s hotel, the menu offers twists on classic regional favorites. “Her home’s artisanal food was kugel, brisket, pastrami and rye bread imported from Winnipeg or Minneapolis and the occasional Sara Lee coffee cake. Here, who knew? Lutefisk? Lefse? Jell-O Martinis?”

My latest novel, The Real Mr. Tobias, takes place in both an imaginary Iowa town that is a stand-in for a smaller Fargo and New York City, where a character has moved after growing up “hungry for history, for beauty. In her seven stop-sign hometown, beyond its brick and fieldstone Carnegie library and a stalwart limestone post office, her world had been…sparsely landscaped, as if an artist had left his canvas unfinished. Yet despite the openness, Birdie couldn’t find her place. This had drawn her all the more to New York, with its density, its layers, its promise.”

But the character returns to the Midwest where “preserved in the amber of memory, even feeding the hogs (the trayf in her husband’s lingua franca) now strikes her as far superior to the life she and he are cobbling together twelve-hundred miles away.”

She is reunited with her grandmother, Joy-Ellen Lindstrom. “While Grandma Lindstrom might be built like a Doric column, she is also a pillar of sound judgment. Joy-Ellen tried to instill…that if they’d been brought up properly, any human instinctively knows the right thing to do in virtually every situation …

“Wasting time is at the top of the list of what flips Joy-Ellen’s wig, along with lying, bamboozling, stealing, and a sweeping category reserved for…racists, right-wing shock jocks, hypochondriacs, foreign cartels that poison the state with drugs along with the meth-heads dimwitted enough to buy the stuff, braggards, homeowners too lazy to keep up their property, corrupt politicians who throw hard-earned money at the Iowa primary, NRA members who use guns for any purpose other than hunting, and people unable to keep their nose on their own face. She doesn’t consider herself political, just sensible.”

Last fall my friend Bruce Dorfman, a close Fargo pal for my entire life, lost a long battle with cancer. After graduating from the University of Texas in Austin, he lived in Atlanta, Chicago, Manhattan and eventually, Tucson. As far as I know, his trips to North Dakota were abbreviated and infrequent—a reunion here, a funeral there. Yet Bruce left instructions for his ashes to be sprinkled in Fargo, which will happen this summer. I plan to be there for the ceremony.

I understand Bruce’s decision. Even when the temperature is -40, a warmth emanates from the state that never leaves you, just as I hope the statute of limitations on claiming my North-Dakota-ness never ends. I may live in New York City now, but Fargo will forever be my emotional home.

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Sally Koslow is the former editor-in-chief of McCall’s Magazine and has held editorial positions at or contributed to many American magazines. She is the author of six novels, one work of non-fiction, contributions to various anthologies and many essays and article. Sally considers herself to be North Dakota’s unofficial ambassador to Manhattan, where she lives with her husband Robert Koslow. They are the parents of two sons and grandparents of four. You can learn more about Sally on www.sallykoslow.com.

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