World of Our Fathers
World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made is a narrative history book written by the American social and literary critic Irving Howe with assistance from Kenneth Libo. First published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1976, it reached #1 on The New York Times best seller list for non-fiction, and won the 1977 U.S. National Book Award in the List of winners of [the National Book Award#History|History category].
The 700-page book offers a sweeping account of the two million East European Jews who migrated to the United States during the four-decade period from 1880 to 1920. Howe focuses on the Lower East Side of New York City when describing the living conditions, jobs, politics, education, religious practices, and Yiddishkeit culture that Jewish immigrants found and made in the U.S.
Summary
The book begins with shtetl life in the Russian Pale of Settlement, which became exceedingly perilous after the March 1881 assassination of Alexander II, czar of Russia. His death triggered a wave of pogroms targeted at Jews, and accelerated their exodus to the New World. Howe charts the immigrants' voyage to Ellis Island, and from there to the Lower East Side, the most densely populated area of New York City: "By 1890 it had 522 inhabitants per acre, by 1900 more than 700."The "greenhorns" struggled to earn a living as sweatshop workers, pushcart peddlers, and small-time retailers. Howe depicts the tiny, crowded tenement apartments, and the sacrifices of first-generation Jewish parents, especially mothers: Howe examines the tension between those who wanted to practice Orthodox Judaism and those who favored secularization. He portrays the Jewish immigrants who attempted to learn the English language, but often ended up with a patois that was "neither quite English nor quite Yiddish, in which the vocabulary of the former was twisted to the syntax of the latter." He writes about the formative period of American Zionism, and its appeal to East Side "dreamers" in the Jewish diaspora.
As a well-known intellectual of the democratic socialist left, Howe recounts the unionization battles fought by immigrant workers, and singles out notable women activists and reformers such as Clara Lemlich, Rose Schneiderman, Lillian Wald, and Belle Moskowitz. He analyzes the prevalence of Jewish socialism, which he terms "a political movement dedicated to building a new society; part of a great international upsurge that began in the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth". He links it to a messianic yearning among Jewish immigrants: "the high moral fervor they had brought with them and the hope for social betterment America aroused in them."
In a section on "The Culture of Yiddish", Howe describes the Yiddish theatre and Yiddish press. He profiles poets and writers such as Mani Leib, Abraham Cahan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Asch, Anzia Yezierska, and the literary critic Shmuel Niger.
In the final section entitled "Dispersion", Howe chronicles the "journeys outward" from the Lower East Side ghetto to the rest of America. Initially, it was Jewish entertainers who gained a foothold in mainstream society. They were followed by novelists, painters and intellectuals until eventually Jews were entering middle-class professions and leaving the city for the suburbs.
Howe concludes the book by stating:
Critical reception
When World of Our Fathers was published in early 1976, it garnered rave reviews. In The [New York Times Book Review], Theodore Solotaroff called it "a great book":In The New Republic, Nathan Glazer labeled the book "a triumph". In The New Leader, Pearl Kazin Bell described it as "history and celebration, memory and judgment" and for second-generation Jewish immigrants, "an act of redemption". Leon Wieseltier wrote in his review:
The most common criticism of the book was that Howe slanted his account of the Lower East Side based on his ideological preferences, i.e., he gave undue importance to Jewish unionism and socialism because of his passion for leftist politics, and as a secularist he underestimated the role of religion in holding together the Jewish immigrant community. In a Commentary essay, Midge Decter expressed this negative view of the book:
Legacy
Decades later, World of Our Fathers elicited reassessments that sought to explain its enduring cultural significance as well as the unlikely fact that a 700-page tome by a socialist intellectual would become a #1 bestseller. Many suggested that Irving Howe had tapped into a deep vein of nostalgia felt by second- and third-generation Jews for the early days of their parents and grandparents. In a re-appreciation written in 1997, Morris Dickstein labeled the book "an elegy for a lost world" which resonated with assimilated Jewish-American readers:Some critics noted that World of Our Fathers appeared at a propitious moment when Americans of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds were seeking to rediscover their heritage. The concurrent success in 1976 of Howe's book along with Alex Haley's Roots: [The Saga of an American Family|Roots] and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior signified an "ethnic revival" trend and the beginning of what would later be known as multiculturalism. Howe was even dubbed "the Jewish Alex Haley".
In a 1997 Centennial Review essay, Kenneth Waltzer reflected on what had changed in Jewish-American life since Howe wrote his book:
In December 2000, the American Jewish History journal devoted an entire issue to World of Our Fathers. In one of the essays, Gerald Sorin wrote: