World of our fathers

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.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member justine

the journey of the east european jews to america and the life they found and made

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LibraryThing member rondoctor

One of the definitive books about Jewish life in eastern Europe, the causes of mass emigration, immigration to the US and life on New York's lower east side.

LibraryThing member bnation

I'm giving this book only two stars because even though the title includes the phrase "The Journey of the East European Jews to America" there appears to be nothing about any place other than New York, and possibly some other U.S. cities. A great many Jews emigrated to Canada (particularly

Montreal), Mexico, Argentina, etc. All "America".The first section, describing conditions in Eastern Europe, motivations for emigrating, and the journeys through Europe and across the Atlantic, is great. That's only about 50 pages out of a 700 page book.

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LibraryThing member miriamparker

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

LibraryThing member simchaboston

Immensely detailed portrait of the New York East Side Jewish community, with lots of information about the adjustment and assimilation of the immigrant Jews into all aspects of the city's urban life and interesting information about the Yiddish culture. It's unfortunate (as the author acknowledges

in his introduction) that despite the broad title, the book focuses so much on New York to the exclusion of other cities. The section on Yiddish culture also included a good deal of literary criticism, which would have been more meaningful if I'd already been familiar with the writers being discussed and then agree with or take issue with the author's judgments. Still worth a read for anyone interested in Jewish history as long as you keep these things in mind.

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