World of Our Fathers

World of Our Fathers tells the story of the two million East European Jews who came to America between 1880 and 1920, and of the world they built and lost on New York's Lower East Side. Irving Howe, with the assistance of Kenneth Libo, begins in the shtetls and cities of the Russian Pale, with the pogroms and poverty that drove the migration, crosses in steerage, and lands at Ellis Island into the tenement streets where the rest of the book lives: the sweatshops and the garment unions built out of them, the Triangle fire, the Yiddish theater with its great tragedians and its adoring galleries, the Forward and the whole roaring Yiddish press, the cafeteria intellectuals, the socialists and the gangsters, the night schools, and the slow climb of the children out of the neighborhood and, as Howe unsentimentally records, out of the culture itself. Howe was one of the New York intellectuals the neighborhood produced, a socialist and a literary critic, and he wrote the book as both historian and heir; the scholarship is thorough, the elegy underneath it unmistakable, and his own politics tilt the coverage toward the labor halls and away from the synagogues, as critics noted. The 700 page history became the most improbable bestseller of its season, reaching the top of the New York Times list, and it won the 1977 National Book Award in History. For American Jews it became the family album of a vanished world; for everyone else it remains the richest single account of what immigration actually felt like from inside.