World of Our Fathers
The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made
Published on 31. October 2017
714 pages
978-1-5040-4755-5 (ISBN)
Description
The National Book Award-winning,
New York Times-bestselling history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories ( The New York Times).
Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements. Like others before and after, they struggled to hold on to the culture and community they brought from their homelands, all the while striving to escape oppression and find opportunity. They faced poverty and crime, but also experienced the excitement of freedom and previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s, they were assimilated into the great melting pot as the Yiddish language slowly gave way to English; work was found in sweatshops; children were sent to both religious and secular schools; and, for the lucky ones, the American dream was attained-if not in the first generation, then by the second or third.
Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, World of Our Fathers explores the many aspects of this time and place in history, from the political to the cultural. In this compelling American story, Irving Howe addresses everything from the story of socialism, the hardships of the ghetto, and the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed scores of garment workers to the "Borscht Belt" resorts of the Catskills in colorful and dramatic detail. Both meticulously researched and lively, it is "a stirring evocation of the adventure and trauma of migration" ( Newsweek).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories ( The New York Times).
Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements. Like others before and after, they struggled to hold on to the culture and community they brought from their homelands, all the while striving to escape oppression and find opportunity. They faced poverty and crime, but also experienced the excitement of freedom and previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s, they were assimilated into the great melting pot as the Yiddish language slowly gave way to English; work was found in sweatshops; children were sent to both religious and secular schools; and, for the lucky ones, the American dream was attained-if not in the first generation, then by the second or third.
Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, World of Our Fathers explores the many aspects of this time and place in history, from the political to the cultural. In this compelling American story, Irving Howe addresses everything from the story of socialism, the hardships of the ghetto, and the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed scores of garment workers to the "Borscht Belt" resorts of the Catskills in colorful and dramatic detail. Both meticulously researched and lively, it is "a stirring evocation of the adventure and trauma of migration" ( Newsweek).
More details
Person
Irving Howe (1920-1993) played a pivotal role in American intellectual life for over five decades, from the 1940s to the 1990s. Best known for
World of Our Fathers, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism. He was the founding editor of
Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years.
Content
- Cover Page
- Dedication
- Foreword by Morris Dickstein
- Preface
- 1 TOWARD AMERICA
- 1 Origins
- The World of the Shtetl
- Ferment and Enlightenment
- The Start of Social Change
- The Prospect of America
- 2 Departure and Arrival
- Crossing into Europe
- The Lure of America
- From Border to Port
- The Ordeal of Steerage
- At Ellis Island
- A Work of Goodness
- "Hordes" of Aliens
- Open Door-and Closed
- The Jews Who Came
- 2 THE EAST SIDE
- 3 The Early Years, 1881-1900
- The First Shock
- "A Gray, Stone World"
- A New Tempo, a New Way
- Peddling and Sewing
- Going to the Land
- In the Tenements
- The Implacability of Gentleness
- A Chaos in Hebrew
- Dislocation and Pathology
- Voices of the Left
- What Migration Meant
- 4 Disorder and Early Progress
- An Early Combat
- New Tastes, New Styles
- Spreading Across the City
- An Experiment in Community
- The Failure of the Banks
- Beginnings of a Bourgeoisie
- What the Census Shows
- A Slow Improvement
- 5 Slum and Shop
- Working in the Shops
- Rising in the World
- Ways to Make a Living
- 6 The Way They Lived Then
- At the Heart of the Family
- Boarders, Desertions, Generational Conflict
- The Inner World of the Landsmanshaft
- Shul, Rabbi, and Cantor
- Versions of Belief
- From Heder to Secular School
- Dreamers of a Nation
- A Bit of Fun on the East Side
- Up into the Catskills
- Matchmakers, Weddings, Funerals
- To the Brim
- 7 The Restlessness of Learning
- "Americanizing" the Greenhorns
- A Visit to the Cafés
- A Passion for Lectures
- The Self-Educated Worker
- Fathers and Sons
- 8 Growing Up in the Ghetto
- Parents and Children
- Delinquents and Gangs
- Girls in the Ghetto
- Going to School
- Jewish Children, American Schools
- Immigrants and the Gary Plan
- City College: Toward a Higher Life
- 9 Jewish Labor, Jewish Socialism
- Early Weaknesses
- The Girls and the Men
- The Triangle Shirt Fire
- The Jewish Working Class
- The Socialist Upsurge
- The Meaning of Jewish Socialism
- 10 Breakup of the Left
- Civil War in the Garment Center
- Dual Unions-and the Furriers
- A Network of Culture
- Recovery, Growth, Adaptation
- From Politics to Sentiment
- 11 Getting into American Politics
- Getting on with Tammany
- The Jews and the Irish
- Maneuvering Within the City
- Low Roads, High Roads
- 12 American Responses
- The Native Reformers
- Stage, Song, and Comic Strip
- From Henry Adams to Henry James
- Legal Rights, Social Rebuffs
- 3 THE CULTURE OF YIDDISH
- 13 The Yiddish Word
- Sweatshop Writers
- Poets of Yiddishkeit
- The Rise of Di Yunge
- Three Yiddish Poets
- The Modernist Poets
- Literary Life on the East Side
- Yiddish Fiction in America
- After the Holocaust
- An Unyielding Voice
- 14 The Yiddish Theatre
- The Vital Hacks
- Time of the Players
- A Theatre of Festival
- Art and Trash
- An Art of Their Own
- 15 The Scholar-Intellectuals
- Where Should They Go?
- Dean of Critics
- A Gifted Voice
- A Disinterested Historian
- 16 The Yiddish Press
- Kindergarten and University
- A New Journalism
- Tell Me, Dear Editor
- Voice of Immigrant Socialism
- Other Papers, Other Voices
- The Time of the Day
- Writing to the End
- 4 DISPERSION
- 17 Journeys Outward
- Entertainers and Popular Artists
- Painters and Sculptors
- The American-Jewish Novelists
- The New York Intellectuals
- 18 At Ease in America?
- The Suburbs: New Ways to Live
- Into the Public Realm
- The Holocaust and After
- Israel and the American Jews
- A Fear Beyond Escaping
- The Immigrant Survivors
- Epilogue: Questions upon Questions
- Image Gallery
- Reference Notes
- Glossary of Yiddish Terms
- Bibliographical Notes
- Index
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright Page
