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mburnamfink 's review for:
World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made
by Irving Howe, Kenneth Libo
An absolute doorstopper of a history, World of our Fathers is both wide-ranging and oddly narrow. Howe wrote this book about the Yiddish culture of New York's East Side from 1880 to 1920. The world is literally that of his parents, who were Jewish immigrants themselves, in my case it's the world of my great grandparents.
The harsh pogroms of Czar Alexander III provided an impetus for millions of Jews to leave the Pale of Settlement. Immigrants endured an often horrific voyage in steerage class steamships, were hurriedly processed at Ellis Island, and almost invariably wound up working in a tailor's shop on the East Side. The crowded tenements and furious sweatshop pace were a far cry from the sedate and ordered world of the shtetl, but the Jews thrived, creating a Yiddish speaking society with newspapers, union organizers, theater, and literature.
The World of Our Fathers looks like a broad social history, but it gets narrow and deep with dives into union organizing, journalism, and literary criticism. These three areas are where Howe spent his career (he was a lifelong organizer with the DSA before it was cool, as well as the founding editor of Dissent), and these intensely detailed chapters make a somewhat ponderous book even more unwieldy.
And finally, there is an inevitable melancholy about the project. In Europe, a Jew had no choice to be a Jew. There was literally nothing between religious observation and atheist socialist agitator. In America, a secular land, as individuals and collectively, Jews had to make a choice as to how much of their culture they were going to preserve. Harsh quotas on immigration starting in 1921 cut the East Side off from the old world, a distance made infinite by the catastrophic losses of the Holocaust. The neighborhoods changed, as children left for the suburbs and new waves of immigrants came in. In the contest between Yiddish and English, assimilation and identity, America won almost completely. Thought I was astounded to learn that Yiddish newspaper Forward still exists, with a print edition running through January 2019!.
40 years on, the Yiddish world is even more distant. The debate has never really ended, with American Jewish identity contested between the poles of Hasidic insularity, AIPAC's ride-or-die Zionism, and the street level radicalism of Never Again Action. This book is a glimpse at a common origin, and the garden from whence modern American Judaism came.
The harsh pogroms of Czar Alexander III provided an impetus for millions of Jews to leave the Pale of Settlement. Immigrants endured an often horrific voyage in steerage class steamships, were hurriedly processed at Ellis Island, and almost invariably wound up working in a tailor's shop on the East Side. The crowded tenements and furious sweatshop pace were a far cry from the sedate and ordered world of the shtetl, but the Jews thrived, creating a Yiddish speaking society with newspapers, union organizers, theater, and literature.
The World of Our Fathers looks like a broad social history, but it gets narrow and deep with dives into union organizing, journalism, and literary criticism. These three areas are where Howe spent his career (he was a lifelong organizer with the DSA before it was cool, as well as the founding editor of Dissent), and these intensely detailed chapters make a somewhat ponderous book even more unwieldy.
And finally, there is an inevitable melancholy about the project. In Europe, a Jew had no choice to be a Jew. There was literally nothing between religious observation and atheist socialist agitator. In America, a secular land, as individuals and collectively, Jews had to make a choice as to how much of their culture they were going to preserve. Harsh quotas on immigration starting in 1921 cut the East Side off from the old world, a distance made infinite by the catastrophic losses of the Holocaust. The neighborhoods changed, as children left for the suburbs and new waves of immigrants came in. In the contest between Yiddish and English, assimilation and identity, America won almost completely. Thought I was astounded to learn that Yiddish newspaper Forward still exists, with a print edition running through January 2019!.
40 years on, the Yiddish world is even more distant. The debate has never really ended, with American Jewish identity contested between the poles of Hasidic insularity, AIPAC's ride-or-die Zionism, and the street level radicalism of Never Again Action. This book is a glimpse at a common origin, and the garden from whence modern American Judaism came.