Chaim Dovid Spivakofsky left the Pale of Settlement and arrived in New York City in 1882, a young man of twenty-one with a traditional Jewish heder education and a political education as a revolutionary socialist in Russia. These twin roots of Yiddishkeit and a zealous identification with the working classes took hold in the libertarian soil of America and became the intellectual and spiritual sources of the career of this remarkable young immigrant. In 1890, a scant eight years after his arrival, a newly minted physician, now known as Charles David Spivak, graduated (with honors) from Jefferson Medical College, and in 1896, Dr. Spivak, with his ailing wife and young son, decamped for Colorado whose climate was thought to offer salutary conditions for his wife's recovery. Indeed, Denver and environs were a magnet for thousands of Jewish (and other) immigrants “chasing the cure” and seeking care in the cold, dry and sunny mountains that were considered to offer the only available cure for tuberculosis.
Characteristically for this young, ardent, and committed physician, Spivak became the founder of the Jewish Consumptives Relief Society (JCRS) that opened its tent doors to East European immigrants with severe infective tuberculosis (TB) who came seeking medical help and the support of a community. The JCRS functioned from 1906 until its closure in 1954 (Spivak died in 1927) and provided care for 10,000 patients, almost the same number that were treated at the Trudeau Institute at Saranac Lake, New York, arguably the most famous and leading American sanatorium founded in 1885. In contrast to the National Jewish Hospital in Denver, a sanatorium founded by the German Jews of the city, the JCRS accepted patients with late-stage disease, and provided a heimish environment with kosher food, cultural activities, and a bouquet of flowers and a basket of fruit to greet each new patient. Moreover, it eschewed the very wealthy in its nonetheless successful national philanthropic campaigns, choosing instead to seek support from ordinary workers and union funds. The institution developed a national network of some 20,000 members and supporters and also contributed to the shift of leadership of American Jewry from the German Jewish community to that of East European immigrants and their offspring. The JCRS was a means of acclimatizing its East European patients to their new country while also understanding the power of a healing environment. As Spivak noted, “If he [the patient] feels at home in the place his recovery is hastened; otherwise it is retarded or prevented” (89). A useful admonition, all the more so, in our frenetic health-care settings!
Charles Spivak had a distinguished academic medical career serving as associate professor of medicine and professor of anatomy at the University of Denver, professor of clinical medicine at the Denver and Gross College of Medicine, and librarian of the Denver Academy of Medicine. He was elected secretary of the Denver and Arapahoe Medical College and served as President of the Colorado Medical Society, finding time for a scholarly productivity of some 150 publications, including papers in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, and Science and a significant contribution to the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901 on “Medicine in the Bible and the Talmud” (a reprint of this article is in the personal library of Sir William Osler, arguably the most prominent internist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Spivak was hailed by his colleagues as a pioneer in the sanatorium movement in America and received everywhere for his expertise in a domain of medicine that started as a voluntary and philanthropic impulse. He summed up his own approach to medicine in a motto that would serve us well to this day: “science tempered by humanity.”
What makes Jeanne E. Abrams's biography, and the life it chronicles, so enchanting is the representation of the exuberant blossoming of Spivak's cultural and social persona as it is intertwined with his professional career. Thus, Spivak was the founding editor of The Denver Jewish News, provided a series of articles in Yiddish on health and hygiene for the Jewish daily Der Forverts, edited by his life-long friend Abraham Cahan, and was a coauthor with Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden), who was a patient at the JCRS, of a prominent Yiddish dictionary of some 340 pages whose subtitle is “All the Hebrew and Chaldaic (Aramaic) Elements of the Yiddish Language Illustrated with Proverbs and Idiomatic Expressions.” This volume appeared in 1911 and was the reason for Spivak's reception as a major dignitary when he travelled to Poland with the Joint Distribution Committee to organize assistance for European Jews made destitute and homeless by the Great War. When Spivak served as a member of the medical team under the aegis of the U.S. Army and spent time surveying the Jewish population in cities and villages, collecting public health data, organizing relief from America, and relocating orphans, he brought back 20,000 letters from Polish Jews to American relatives. Spivak served as a delegate to the American Jewish Congress and as member of the executive of the American Jewish Committee, whose other members included Julian Mack, Cyrus Sulzberger, and Felix Warburg. Spivak's early Zionist impulses were evident in his service on the board of directors of the Zionist Organization of America and the Denver committee for the United Palestine Appeal, his purchase of land in “New Zion,” and in his invitation from Warburg to serve on the American advisory committee of the Hebrew University.
The extraordinary amalgam in Spivak's life and career of tradition and secular socialism that managed to resolve the usual tensions between the two is wonderfully illustrated in this biography. Spivak's close friend and librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Isaac Rivkind, noted that during a short visit to New York in 1927, toward the end of his life, Spivak attended “a meeting of Hebrew-speaking physicians; a banquet hosted by Hadoar, a Hebrew periodical; and a meeting of Jewish communists discussing plans to celebrate May Day, and he also participated in the cornerstone celebration of the Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Seminary” (12). More poignant, perhaps, are the stipulations in Spivak's will that he be buried in accordance with Orthodox customs, but that his body be dissected and that the bones and organs be shipped to the university in Jerusalem for anatomy teaching. His viscera were interred in the Workman's Circle (Arbeiter Ring) section of the Golden Hill Orthodox Jewish Cemetery, among his patients. Spivak's will, in making this stipulation, apparently explained his choice in Yiddish as follows, “Ich vel zey bashaynen, zey veln mir bashaynen” (I will beautify them, and they will beautify me). As a fitting coda perhaps, the Arbeiter Ring dedicated its new educational building in Denver as the Spivak Institute in his memory.
Charles Spivak was certainly a unique and remarkable individual, yet his life is metonymic for those first-generation East European immigrants and their offspring who contributed so much to the intellectual and cultural excitement of twentieth-century America. From alcove No. 1 at the City College of New York (CCNY) to movies in Hollywood, from literary New York to biomedical research, from music of the classics to that of Broadway, what is it about those people, that time and place, that gave rise to such explosion of creativity? Spivak's biographer offers few hints to that long-standing conundrum: a transplanted European enlightenment that found fertile soil; a pent-up desire to apply the casuistry of the yeshiva to the contemporary world; the opportunity and burden of having one foot on each of two continents; the need to resolve tensions by creative adaptability evident in lifelong intellectual evolution and maturation; the persistence of the outsider to prove his worth; the focusing of energies to survive; the excitement of a life of the mind transferred from Talmud to textbook; and an emergent property of a complex system whose variables include time, space, and people. Many are possible and several are likely explanations. All, however, are discernible in this interesting volume.
Jeanne Abrams is a professor at Penrose Library at the University of Denver and director of the Beck Archives and Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society. Her skills as an archivist and historian are readily evident in this well-documented and detailed picture of a complex and fascinating individual whose life story will now be better known. She has crafted a warm, engaging and accessible biography that should be required reading material for any student of American Jewish history.
