Nancy

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Nancy is Currently Reading

Nancy is currently reading

Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman (Goodreads Author)

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Feb 24, 2026 07:43PM

Nancy is currently reading

Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep

by Kenneth Miller (Goodreads Author)

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Dec 30, 2025 03:58PM

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World of Our Fathers: The Journey of The Eastern European Jews to America

by Irving Howe

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Nancy said: " (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 (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. ...more "

progress:

(page 202 of 734)
— Oct 25, 2016 08:27PM

Aug 28, 2016 02:01PM · see review

Nancy’s Quotes

“If you can work anywhere, anytime, then pretty soon you're working everywhere all the time.”
― Judy Nichols, Tree Huggers

tags: work

14 likes

“...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”
― Richard Dawkins

tags: dissent, opinion, truth

335 likes

“In 1487 alone, two hundred heretics had-in one of the greatest euphemisms in the history of language-"relaxed," that is, burned at the stake.

Dogs of God, Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors”
― James Reston

tags: religion

2 likes

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

tags: atheism, philosophy

4631 likes

“..it sounded very good and very false at the same time, so that you had the feeling that even if was true, he was touching only on the very highest points and maybe embellishing those a little.”
― Bill Pronzini, The Vanished

tags: false, mystery, true

5 likes

More of Nancy’s quotes…