World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made

by Irving Howe

A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic.

Winner of the National Book Award, 1976

World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century.

This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

Genres: History, Jewish, Nonfiction, Judaism, American History, Religion, New York

768 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Reviews

[Dvora Treisman · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me an awfully long time to read this, not because I didn't like it or that it wasn't interesting, but because it was so dense. So I had to read it little by little, and not in bed at night. Dense as it was, it was well worth the time it took to read. My parents were immigrants to the US, but they came after WWII, were not Yiddish-speakers, and we never lived in the lower East Side, only in Brooklyn, and then only for a short while before we moved to California. So Howe wasn't describing my family history, and yet somehow he was describing my history. And he described it in every detail, everything related to religion, culture, language, work, politics, art, you name it, he deals with it. This is an excellent history of American Jewish culture.

[M. Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating account of the two million East European Jews who migrated to New York City's Lower East Side beginning in the 1880's. The book describes the immigrants' attempts to maintain their Yiddish culture while at the same time, due to both external pressures and their own desires, fit into American society. Among the most interesting topics covered are poverty, education, socialism and the labor movement, Yiddish literature and the Yiddish theater. There are nearly thirty entertaining and enlightening photographs and, a highlight,, loads of drawings by Jacob Epstein. Irving Howe, the author, was a top literary critic and intellectual who was part of this diaspora. Absorbing and fact-filled, the book helped me to get in touch with my own Jewish roots but would be a terrific and informative read for non-Jews, as well.

[Lynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A somewhat interesting book, but deadly dull in places. Too preoccupied with socialism, unionism, intellectualism and other “isms”. It was most interesting when it talked about the people who came here and why, and less interesting when it delved into social movements. At times I was just skimming, which is never a good sign. It is a scholarly work and maybe too highbrow for me.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Adam Glantz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was hot during the craze for ethnic origins in the 70s, which is remarkable since it's relatively long and dense. For Howe, the culture of eastern European Jews who emigrated to America is essentially Yiddishkeit: Yiddish in language, self-consciously Jewish in identity, universalist in ideological aspirations, unionist-socialist in politics (until the New Deal), and thirsty for knowledge and expression. Its spectacular achievement was its ability to catch up with the rest of secular Western culture in just a few years after emerging from the shtetl and while still socially and economically overburdened; its pathos was its inability to compete with the lure of that wider secular culture for the attention of its second and third generations, nor to attain its collective socialist ideals along with the individual successes of its members.

The author conveys an encyclopedic knowledge of many aspects of this culture, displaying the ability to parse small distinctions between the people he introduces and working out the development of trends in great detail. "On the other hand [says Kirkus], his writing often has the savory charm of an overdone pot roast; his vast quantities of material degenerate into imposing but barely navigable ledgers of names and facts ..." and I was often overwhelmed by his thick and abstruse descriptions. I also found myself longing for what Howe left out. As a religion, east European Judaism was clearly in retreat for decades, but it was still a potent force and Howe gives it short shrift in chapter after chapter on socialism and secular culture. This is probably tied to his decision to focus on New York (and the lower East Side in particular) where socialism and secular intellectualism were more powerful than in the other, more parochial cities of the American northeast.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dug this out of my library in Sweden - one of those books I really WANT to read but still have not done so. My father's side of the family came from Kiev to NY in the beginning of the 1900s, so this ought to be sort of a story of my great grandfather's and his family's experiences.

This is a very detailed book best used for research.

[Marina the Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid, thorough history, a bit long for me. I skipped at some point.

[Julia Hendon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magisterial and sympathetic social and cultural history of the East European Jewish migration to New York City in the late 19th through early 20th centuries. Howe demonstrates a fondness and respect for these immigrants who fled violence, anti-Semitism, and poverty to America. Here they lived at first in East Side tenements and lived lives of grinding poverty but without the same threats as before. Howe focuses on what it is as like to live on the East Side, from tenement life to the life of the streets. He covers working conditions and the rise of socialist idealism, leading in turn to efforts to improve working conditions that led to the development of the needle trades unions. The last third of this massive tome discusses the cultural life with special emphasis on newspapers, theatre, and literature. The thread tying all this together is the Yiddish language and its central role in East European Immigrant Jewish identity. This sort of scholarship is rarely published anymore — too detailed, too long, perhaps. I can see other equally effective ways to write about these people and their experiences. But Howe achieved something notable about his own people and I celebrate that.

[Stephie Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

a preety comprehensive view of Jewish immagrant life.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book. This took me forever to read but it was so well-researched and I learned a ton.

[Mark]

Now that Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist (the kiss of death, alas, in American politics) has declared his candidacy for president, perhaps Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers will reenter the zeitgeist and receive the attention it so richly deserves, Senator Sanders, in many respects, is the latter-day representative of the social, political and cultural milieu Mr. Howe so thoroughly and affectionately documents in this fine book.

When Eastern European Jews began departing their homelands in the late-nineteenth century, they carried with them the communitarian traditions of the shtetl. Unsurprisingly, these traditions were expressed in and as socialist politics. Much of the political--as well as social and cultural--ferment Eastern European Jews aroused occurred on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (which, after reading this book, I'll look at differently and appreciate even more). When the Williamsburg Bridge went up in 1903, connecting Delancey Street on the Lower East Side with Havemeyer Street in Brooklyn, many of these recently arrived immigrants moved across the East River to Williamsburg, where many of their descendants remain. Bernie Sanders, whose father's family perished in the Holocaust, was born in Brooklyn in 1941. He attended James Madison High School on Bedford Avenue, and there he led the track team.

Irving Howe was a lifelong socialist; the documentary film "Arguing the World" is a very nice biography of Mr. Howe and his erstwhile classmates at the City College of New York (known at one time as "the Harvard of the proletariat"), Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol. The film nicely documents the various intellectual trajectories these four sons of the Lower East Side traveled along. One of the primary themes of World of Our Fathers concerns the doctrinal squabbles among the Jewish socialists on the Lower East Side.

Along the way, Mr. Howe presents detailed and fascinating analyses of Yiddish culture and its effect on broader American culture. He does a particularly nice job of explicating Yiddish humor, and its exponents like Henny Youngman, Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield, and the extent to which it influenced comedians of all stripes. I found myself wondering what Irving Howe would make of latter-day borscht belt comedians like Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld.

This is an exceptional work of scholarship that it is imbued with Mr. Howe's (born, incidentally, as Irving Hohenstein) obvious affinity with and a fondness for the subject. For some reason, it took me 25 years too get around to reading this book. If the subject of the immigration of Eastern European Jews to the United States, and the influence of those new citizens on American culture and society interests you in any way, I very highly recommend this book--as well as what is arguably its companion, Our Crowd by Stephen Birmingham.

[Nancy]

(12/31/15)This is a huge book so rather than waiting until I finish it, I will comment as I progress. This is not about my own ancestors but about the world of my father-in-law and his parents, people I never met as all of them died many years before I met my husband.

(2/3/16) I am still early in the book but in a kind of quirk of fate, I started reading a scrap book of newspaper clippings my great grandfather started as a young teen in 1890 which is a look into his world during the same time period. My father-in-law's parents were contemporaries of my great grandfather. My relative was part of an established family that had come to rural SW Ohio in the early 1800's and was well established by 1890 while my in-laws were children in Belarus, most likely quite poor, but we know almost nothing about them at this time.

Howe's narrative is not about a specific family but includes contemporaneous descriptions of events and situations tied together with Howe's explanation of historical context. My relative's scrap book is a mixture of newspaper slipping about himself, friends and relatives and clippings about big events such as the assassination of President McKinley. Because Allen Nichols lived in a small town, many of the clippings are more like small short stories than newspaper articles. There is a great deal of boosterism in the articles about Batavia getting electricity or a new factory. (If any of these factories were actually built, they were gone by the 1950's when I was growing up in the same, still small, town. )

One thing that strikes me in both is the deaths of young people. We believe that death came early and often in crowded slums, but have a view that early death was rare in small mid-western towns. The many obituaries Allen Nichols pasted into his scrap book let us know how often disease (probably mostly TB and pneumonia) took young women. These women are buried in a family plot a few blocks from my parents house so I was vaguely aware of them growing up. Reading their obituaries makes them real, just as Howe does in his stories about the Eastern European Jews.

Interestingly, while most of the book so far describes events in Europe and New York City, I learned that there was a Jewish communal farm in a neighboring Oregon County that lasted about 5 years in the 1880's. It had very similar problems to the communes of the 1960's and 70's so 5 years might have been a pretty good run.

6/18/16
After having put this book aside for a number of months, I've picked it back up and reached the era where my husband's grandparents immigrated to New York from Belarus. Reportedly they met and married after arriving in the US around 1905, during the peak of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe. Over a million eastern European Jews immigrated to the United States between 1900 and 1910 with a large portion of them settling in New York.

[Marvin A. Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely authoritative

Tough read, but extremely authoritative. I could plot my family’s coming to America and assimilation almost like it was written about them. I would have given it 5 stars except it was tough chunking my way through a lot of the detail.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is extremely long, and maybe too detailed in some places, but is an invaluable, classic book for understanding the Eastern European Jews who immigrated to America in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The focus is on New York City and specifically the Lower East Side.

Like I said this book is so long it took me months to get through and while the general topic is interesting, it can be a bit dense and dry, so doing it in bite-sized pieces is probably the best way to get through it. I found myself reading about 3% of the book each time I sat down to read. There were some places, I feel like there didn't need to be quite so much detail. For example, there would be places where Howe would mention a particular prominent figure on the East Side and insert essentially a brief biography of them.

That being said, its strength is how much ground it covers. It covers the demographic characteristics of who came to America and why. Much of it focuses on their daily lives, such as tenement life, work and labor unions, Jewish ideological/political/social movements, the role of religion in daily life, play and entertainment, the family, assimilation, education, literature and newspapers, grappling with the Holocaust and the postwar period. Throughout, it returns to the central question of what being Jewish means and how Jewish Americans think about their collective pasts (the world of our fathers). Another recurring theme is the discussion of Yiddishkeit and the rise and fall of Yiddish culture in the U.S. The author has a clear personal connection to the subject matter which gives it a special perspective. The tone and writing is very academic.

Overall, I would recommend this book if you are interested in Jewish American history, since it's a good resource to consult. It seems extensive, well-researched and I learned a lot.

[Maria Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel tells of the journeys of various groups of Eastern European Jews as they migrated to America. One distinction about Jews migration from country to country is how they steadily maintain their religious beliefs despite assimilating as part of the country that they live in. That belief has layers like an onion, with either completely strict following to the letter rules or bare minimum only high holy days observations. I read this book because the reasoning behind the migration and how the immigrants had to deal with adapting while maintaining their culture, is similar to what my grandparents dealt with on their migration to the USA and assimilation into USA citizenship. Despite being cultural different, most European Jews were highly educated in specialized needed trades that helped them gain employment and in some areas, gain the monopoly, like the jewelry trade and banking fields. They were the first group of tailors to set up their own factories.
What's interesting is that liberal thinking is most prevalent among the second and third generations of Jewsih immigrants despite their forefathers being constantly harrassed and mistreated no matter what nation or country they lived in, which probably caused mistrust by others, not Jewish, of their cultural differences, despite similarities. Big example was Albert Einstein, who was denied access to study and develop his theories because of his religious beliefs.
But the descriptions of the tenements and slums in Manhattan is quite accurate. Simce they as a group tended to take care of their own, they had organized sanitariums for caring for the ill, mostly afficted with tuberculosis, one of the first forms of hospital settings to care for the sick. They of all the immigrants tended to stay within a enclave area to increase maintaining the culture and separation. They maintained two measures of responses to anything that was other to them. First, an austere balance sheet of the outrage to which they had been subjected to and which, even without a final reckoning on earth, they did not propose to forget; and second, a readiness to rejoice in the smallest of gains. So whatever suffering they endured here in the USA was nothing compared to what they left behind.
Most of the Easteren European Jews became gainfully employed during the 1890s-forward as garment workers, especially in NYC , Boston, Chicago, and Philadephia which were becoming the major places of Jewish settlement and the garment centers for the USA. Despite the employers being German-Jewish, it was easier for the Eastern European Jews to deal with than a gentile employer. But this didn't stop sweatshops from forming in the garment industries which started paying by piece work low wages. It was not until the fire of 1910, that wages improved at least, which made garemt workers the highest paid trade worker, plus despite still living in the slums able to support their family groups
As individuals started to gain wealth by their enterprises and raised their social status, they became not completely comfortable in any world (their business world did not share their religious/family life). They were resented for their knowledge and skills in both worlds. But they were the first workers to organize trade unions, which in those days , did create better working conditions and pay for the workers in the floowoing areas--butchers, grocers, drygoods dealers, restaurant keepers, shoe dealers, coal dealers, hardware dealers, and booksellers. Businesses included photography, milk business, drugstores barbershops, physicians, pharmists, dentists, candy stores, ice cream parlors, saloons,lawyers, bakeries, laundries and veterinarians. The biggest growth in wealth was real estate investments, by buying the places they rented and becoming landlords. The most impressive wealth moguls were the Hollywood Moguls who built the movie lots and both made the movies by gained money from the distribution. (Universal, Warner Brothers-Goldwyn, Mayer,Fox ,Cohn, Lasky, Zukor) who appeared with non-Jewish women by their sides, uneducated but successful men who knew how to make money. They found a way to enter civil service jobs with the second generation by being better prepared to pass the exams to gain the job. In today's world of 2022, those of Asian culture rival that ambition to succeed in these fields. There were some industries that clearly discriminated against hiring any immigrants in the 1920s. But many of these Jews rising in wealth, moved from Manhattan to Borough Park in Brooklyn, The Upper West Side of Manhattan, the West Bronx.
As they created bigger enclaves of population, plus learning to adapt into their diet other foods allowed by their religious culture like vegetables beyond cabbage, beets, and carrots and potatoes. As more younger generations acclimated to America, they developed a branch of religious services that allowed less strict adherence to older customs (no beards, mixed attendance, etc), which developed more in the Jews that left the older enclaves to the East Side (The Reformed version)and the more Conservatives became the form of worship with the older standards in the Othodox observers, which were people who only interacted within the conclave and didn't associate with gentiles. Eventually a form of schooling was developed to teach Jewish theology to the younger members and expand their minds. While this was going on,during the 1910s. a Zionist organization within both factors was growing. It was the development of an need for an independent nation free from being part of another nation. It eventually saw fruitation when Isreal became a nation. Before that occurred, the movement helped Westernized Jewish culture into English, but also helped keep Jewish faith from losing it relevance.
Since most of this book is about how the Jewish immigrants settled in New York, a mention has to be made of the Catskill area, wich was originally farm land but hard to keep successful. Many farms were purchased and set up as summer vacation homes. Eventuallly casinos and hotels would replace the homes and become the Borcht belt referred to by the comedians who started their careers there.
Traditional customs upheld by these Jewish immigrants included areas with most importance in their lives--weddings and funerals. Matchmakers have a big role usually started by the parents, mostly. Weddings were big hall events involving hundreds of guests. The more money paid for the event the bigger the hall. Funerals were equally important with details and costs-casket, hearse, coaches and the workers (needed to bury the body). They even had professional morners to wail and sing prior to the burial.
Because most of the newly arrived Jewsih immigrants had to learn English, including the children who attended public schools in NYC, bilingual special classes of smaller sizes were made so that they could learn faster until they were able to succeed in the regular classes. Just like today, the students who made the effort to learn succeeded and those who didn't failed to achieve. Those who achieved were able to advance their learning to even go to college. Jewish girls went mostly to Hunter College and those with more wealth went to Barnard College. Most Jewsih women who went to college were able to become teachers in the schools system, the men became college lectorers or speakers for organizations. Socalism was the prevailing philosophy discussion. City College became known for its debating forums. Studies most attended by Jewish students in college were mostly mathematics, history and literature. Subject like shop and mechanical drawing (architecture)had little value. Cohen is a known person of that era, born in Russian, came to America speaking Yiddish, encouraged to use his mind, he became a teacher of philosophy at City College using the Socratic method of teaching, putting out question after question to encourage discussion. But even he admitted that his method of mind development was not sustainable for real learning.
The rest of the book, goes through how both the tendency of the East European Jewish immigrants to embrace socialism and and how it blended with maintaining their religious culture affected their views find different areas. They developed many union groups which then turned to influencing politics and electing representatives into political offices to get their needs addressed. There was a big separation after WWI between the German Jews and the Eastern European Jews in idealiogy, especially with Tammany Hall gaining in influence. They opposed Theodore Roosevelt's efforts as being too liberal and voted for the more "conservative" Democrat candidates which Tammany supported because he gave them "services " in return--prebegining of what we call welfare arrangements--charity help, social worker help, medical help, burial arrangements--making it easier to help those in constant need. This connection to Tammany Hall also was the opening door for many careers to get into the selected clubs that paid for the services. By the 1940s despite being supporter of the Democratic Party, all entry into positions of cabinet posts in city administrations came from Republicans-who appointed more numbers than the Democratic predecessors ever did.
There was also Jewish gangsters, one of the most famous was Rosenthal who operated a gambling place in the Tenderloin district, until he was murdered. Another was Arnold Rothstein. Woodrow Wilson was considered a man of lofty idealism favored by many liberals, especially the more affluent and better-educated Jews.And through their support, got Brandeis nominated for the Supreme Court. They also supported the election of Al Smith, who created the legislation that limited exploitation of labor and gave legal recognition to worker rights--another entry into welfare state. He also pushed through a disreputable gerrymandering of election districts. and he was considered a kindred part of their own needs because he succeeded the American snobbism, because he eased the way for Jewish intellectuals to become old-line politicians. It was a Jewish woman named Belle Moskowitz who was his advisory that guided his thinking. Herbert Lehman was the first German-Jewish figure that the Eastern Europen Jews accepted and he bridged the split of the two main strands to support Roosevelt and his New Deal program to secure the large number of Jewsih voters. In 1936 several trade-union leaders Dubinsky, Zaritsky and Hiilman got together to discuss a new party in New York that could run its own local candidates while supporting national candidates and so the American Labor Party was formed, followed by the Liberal party which gave them position to bargain for political influence and patronage in the politics of NYC. They did this because Roosevelt's proposals for social security, unemployment insurance and legislation enabling union organization was realization of their socialist program. Little knowing how little Roosevelt and his Adminsistration would help the refugees fleeing Europe. This was an interesting read, with references to different time periods and individuals who may have created part of the history of Jewsih people in America. It did explain quite a bit about how we got to the current 2022 separation of thinking.

[Marc Gerstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough and highly readable account of the American Jewish experience starting with the state of affairs in Europe in the late 19th Century that led to the desire to emigrate, the challenges in actually making the move, the often traumatic transition to the new world and the evolution of the community experience once here. It certainly nails the lid shut on stereotypes of Jews necessarily being well to do. The early experience on the lower east side of Manhattan was heavy on poverty, crime and dreadful living conditions, and awkward relations between the earlier German Jewish immigrants and the, I suppose, riff-raff that came in later from Eastern Europe. Things got better over time, but it was a long and difficult process and Howe guides readers through all of it up through the late 1970s, which is when the book was originally published. A lot more has happened since then, but Howe’s presentation shows the onset of trends that would continue beyond the time covered in the book. Excellent work throughout.

[Yitz Dubovick · Rating 1 out of 5]

very poor book, not at all what I expected. Howe describes all the negative aspects of Jewish Immigration from Eastern Europe to the USA. a waste of money and time

[Mike Goldstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense and fascinating. As thorough of a look at Ashkenazi migration to the US as one could hope for, with a special, warm-hearted focus on leftist politics where the author's passion and nostalgia really shine through. A little old-age grumpiness pokes out of Howe's description of the contemporary moment (the early 70s), and he fails to imagine how pro-Palestinian activism could fit in the leftist and humanist ethos that he just spent hundreds of pages describing, but eh what do you expect. He does offer one of the best and most illuminating descriptions that I've ever read of the de-culturized, country club Conservative Judaism that I grew up in.

Yiddish culture feels like my inheritance, but it's one I can barely engage with. Reading this book helped me feel like I'm still a part of that.

[Vincent Lombardo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is NOT a book to be read from cover to cover! It is unnecessarily difficult to read. The book is dense and academic. Howe just recites facts and quotes extensively from his primary sources. There is no thesis, no riveting narrative. I slogged through it, and skipped and skimmed and read what I wanted. However, although limited in scope -- Howe concentrates only on the Eastern European Jews who landed in New York City -- there is much good information here, and the Table of Contents and Index are comprehensive.

[Carolynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was due at the library before I could get far into it. It is VERY long and slow going!

World of Our Fathers is a meticulously detailed account of how and why Jews came to the US, and what their lives were in the New World. I had to return the book before it even reached the 20th Century. I recommend this book but with the caveat that it reads like an encyclopedia and needs to be read in small doses.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This mammoth study of the arrival of East European Jewish immigrants in America, and of the lives they made in the US, is an important book, sometimes fascinating, often tedious, ultimately both rewarding and exhausting.

The book is broad in scope and impressively researched. It covers social, political, religious and cultural history. The author wears a lot of hats here, as historian, sociologist, and book and theater critic, among other roles. He deals with small details and big issues. The overriding question, as I saw it, was the issue of how a people, an oppressed minority in their native countries, can start a completely different life on the other side of the world while still preserving what is most important to them - their culture, religion and moral values. The answer is complicated and the author endeavors, mostly successfully, to outline the complications to his readers.

Given the length and detail of the book, I was a bit surprised that the first section, discussing the departures from Europe and the travel across the ocean, was relatively brief. The author is mostly interested in the lives of the immigrants in America, and the great bulk of the book was devoted to that. Although the book was written almost fifty years ago, much of the discussion is relevant to immigration issues in the present day. The parallels with Asian immigrants, with the emphasis on education to improve the lot of the next generation (and attempts by some to impose a "cap" on the number of such immigrants admitted to elite schools) is just one example.

For me, the book worked the best when it focused in the stories of individuals. How do people who start out working long hours for pennies in sweatshops advance in society? There were several examples of how such things can occur and these were some of the most rewarding sections of the book. Frankly, the book needed more of that. The author often talked at great length in broad generalizations when more specific examples would have made his points much more effectively. I was fascinated by the individual stories, like that of Lillian Wald, and wanted to hear more about individuals.

The level of detail was both a help and a curse in understanding the story. The author effectively used census and voting data to illustrate some of his points. But statistical and other detail really dragged the book down at some points. For example, I understand the importance of the landsmanschaftn (excuse the spelling if I've erred here), but was it really necessary to include lengthy excerpts from their constitutions?

Particular highlights for me were the sections late in the book about the culture that arose from the immigrant experience, particularly the work of the Yiddish poets and novelists. Here the author was wise to include quotations from the poems and novels, such as Henry Roth's masterful "Call It Sleep," as these works really brought home to the reader the hardships of the immigrant experience. Those quotations illustrated the shortcomings of the author's more frequent approach of broad generalizations, as the poets and novelists captured the experiences of the immigrants much more eloquently than the author did.

One of the other reviewers commented that there were too many "isms" in the book and I heartily concur with that opinion. The author was a well known socialist, and he clearly had a great and almost romantic affection for radical politics. At numerous points in the book, he launched into long digressions about such issues. Strangely, he never actually discussed the political programs for which socialists and other left wing groups advocated. It was more that he was in love with the whole idea of being a socialist or other radical political figure. Words like "comrade," and "proletarian," which these days probably are tossed around as sarcastic references to discredited Communist regimes, are used with a kind of reverence in the book. At several points the book gets bogged down with lengthy and tedious discussions of socialism, Bolshevism, Stalinism, radicalism, Trotskyism, modernism, and every other ism you could possibly think of.

The author was a very learned and intelligent man and writes with a strongly opinionated, self-assured style. His discussions of poetry and literature were fascinating and illuminating. But his intellectual approach does not always make for interesting reading. He loves to throw around terms like polemicist, dialectics and intelligentsia. It's almost as if he is trying to show off his superior knowledge and it doesn't really add a lot to the story.

As the book was written a half century ago, some of the language is dated and grates on the ears. The frequent use of "Native Americans" to refer to white people whose ancestors came from Europe before the Jews is jarring in an era when the term refers to the continent's actual natives, the so-called American Indians. His references to grown women employed in factories as "girls" is grating, and the section about Jewish mothers, filled with stereotypes, is a bit cringy.

This is a valuable study, but can a book of more than 1000 pages (over 35 hours in the audiobook version, which is what I had) leave you wanting more? I wish there was less of the author pontificating and more individual stories. I wanted to see more individual persons to get a better sense of the people in the collective sense. Still, I'm glad that I made it through the book and learned a lot that I didn't know before.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a subject the has meaning for me but for some reason I just can't get through this book. I've tried to read it 3 times and have failed to get through it each time. Can't give you a reason for it. That's just the way it is.

[Ann Tonks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess that I didn't finish this book but it might be one I come back to. However, what I did read was a fascinating description of Jewish migration to the US - the why, the how, the results. Detailed, meticulous research but told in an effective and well written way.

[Matthew Matheson]

Argueing the World: (documentary)
Daniel Bell
Nathan Glazer
Irving Howe-3
Irving Kristol

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you, Irving Howe, for doing lots of research so that I could read about it.

[Richard Kravitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite the tome. An interesting time. Gave me a good background for when I read other books on this topic and era.

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much focus on literary and newspaper figures.

[Bill Kaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read World of Our Fathers for the 2024 All Around the Year in 52 Books. The prompt was: A book that has been on your TBR for over a year,

I have owned this book for almost fifty years and pulled the book off my shelves several times (about once a decade). I am a cultural but not particularly observant Jew who has always been interested in my ancestry (German Jewish on my mother's side and Russian Jewish on my father's side) and my Jewish identity. I have always thought that the book would enrich my understanding of these topics but it is a big book. I made it through the first two or three chapters a couple of times but stalled just as began to get into the heart of the book that described in great and loving detail the subject of the gradual anchoring in and eventual dispersal major immigration centers with a particular focus on the East Side of New York CIty. These immigrants brought with them a dynamic "Yiddishkeit"("modern" Yiddish culture) that had emerged in Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. The American Yiddishkeit reached its early maturity in the first two decades of the twentieth century when my grandparents were children/young adults. My parents grew up during the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War that followed. I was born in the early 1950s and knew much of the basic biographical information about my Jewish ancestors in America. The book did a masterful job of filling in my understanding of the world that my grandparents were young adults in. (My only critique of the book was that, at times, it would slow down due to excessive detail.

I will likely have more to write at a later date.

[S Ravishankar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book documenting the arrival, early life and struggles of the east european jews, the evolution of hiddish language and surrounding culture in New York East side.
All aspects of the culture and life - immigration and citizenship, survival, economic hardships, labour unions, the press, education, arts and drama, racial tensions, migration to the West and South, relocation to suburbs and smaller towns, attempts at farming all covered in such minute and engrossing detail.
I could imagine that such travails would be part of most large emigrations in the world.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was dense and not an easy read, but very worthwhile. Another book off James Mustich’s list. “World of our Fathers” covers the migration of Eastern European Jews to America in the 1880-1890s and their experiences.
An in depth look at immigrant lives and the pressures of assimilation vs maintaining their culture/previous ways of life.