Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

The book’s first chapter, which discusses the idea of the common life, explores enduring and often contrasting views on pluralism and assimilation, on balkanization and cultural sharing. In 1892, social reformer and Hull-House founder Jane Addams discussed in her words, “our common life.” One example that speaks to this idea centers on a self-described “Hull-House girl.” Her name was Hilda Polacheck, a Polish Jewish immigrant who came to the United States in that year. Shortly after her arrival in the west side Chicago neighborhood near the settlement house, Hilda described her first Christmas in America.

An Irish playmate had invited her to one of Jane Addams’s annual Christmas parties at the settlement house. For Hilda, who grew up in a Polish shtetl, the idea of going out on a Christmas night was fraught with danger. “I can’t go out,” she told her friend. “I might get killed.” Her friend assured her that she had attended this party in years past and no one ever lost their life there. So, without telling her mother or her siblings, Hilda went to the event and savored it all: the lit candles on the trees, the singing of carols, and the warmth that Jane Addams radiated toward all those present. Hilda wrote, “I became an American at this party. I was with children who had been brought to America from all corners of the earth. The fathers and mothers of all of us had come in search of a free and happy life. And we were having a good time at a party. We were all poor. Most of us were underfed. Some of us had torn shoes. But we were not afraid of each other.”

Hilda’s story comes to us from a past unedited by the future, here for us, now.