Irving HoweRessenyes

Collection of stories

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.

This is an excellent collection of very short stories, few if any exceeding 9,000 words. Tolstoy, Hemingway, Marquez, and dozens of other great writers are represented. If there's a caveat, it's that most of the stories avoid twist endings and, indeed, a majority seem to end without obvious or concrete resolutions. It is perhaps no coincidence that my two favorites did, in fact, come to very firm conclusions.

I wanted to like these stories, but they are all so damn depressing!

A stolen name and wrote a book only to disparage the greatest English writer.

4/17/22

Good book of Jewish tales. I really like old Jewish tales.

liked 1 story

Excellent so far. I stopped reading once the book got to the Tevya stories, I left a bookmark in the volume.

This anthology was pure reading pleasure. To anyone who, like me, has heard of Sholom Aleichem, and is probably familiar with his character Tevye the Dairyman from the successful 'Fiddler on the Roof' musical play/film - an adaptation of some of the 'Tevye's Daughters' stories, but who has not previously read his work; if you enjoyed that character - and want a bit more - then as far as I can tell you're in for a treat with much of what he wrote. 'The Best of' includes twenty-two stories from his work - many of which are newly translated here with previously omitted material, as well as three appearing in English for the first time.

These hugely enjoyable stories while on the one hand entertaining, are on the other also a moving illumination of a culture now vanished of course, that of the shtetl - the small Jewish semi-rural communities of eastern Europe that were scattered like salt and pepper throughout the Russian Empire's 'Pale of Settlement' and the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That small planet of a Yiddish speaking people, the 'old country', their villages and inns, their prayer-houses and bath-houses, the chicken yards, tailors' workshops and market places where they worked, as we know had pretty much all gone by the mid-20th century - ending predominantly in either mass emigration or mass extermination. Reading these stories will momentarily recreate that lost world.

As the editors suggest in their epistolary introduction (which I found extremely worthwhile reading having finished the stories first) - If you follow the line of the plot, [referring to the Tevye stories] it traces nothing less than the breakup of an entire culture. ... Tevye, who is actually defenceless against the barrage of challenges and attacks that lay him low, should have been a tragic victim. Instead, balancing his losses on the sharp edge of his tongue, he maintains the precarious posture of a comic hero."

Sholom Aleichem - the pen name of Solomon Nahumovitch Rabinovitch (1859-1916)- was a master humourist. A master of character, of setting, of timing, of leaving you wanting more - everything you would want from a great teller of tales. This collection - clearly a labour of love for the academic editors - is not just a selection of the Tevye stories - not that I'd be complaining - but effectively is a retrospective representation of his different story themes and many memorable characters that he created. There's Shimon-Eli a haunted tailor, Mottel the cantor's son, Benjamin Lastetchke ("the richest man in Kasrilevke. There is no end to his greatness!") and the Krushniker delegation to name a few. The fictional shtetl of Kasrilveke itself is perhaps his greatest creation of all. He takes you there with just a few strokes of his pen. The honest hard-working mensch, the idle beggar, the gossip, the unfortunate entrepreneur, the fool, the con-artist, the sage, the spirit of beloved grandparents long gone - they're all here.

But don't read Sholom Aleichem if a little chauvinism here and there offends. Tevye the milkman has a wonderfully mischievous line in matrimonial put-downs:

'"What do you say?" I ask my wife. "What do you think of his proposition?"

"What do you want me to say?" she asks. "I know that Mencachem-Mendel isn't a nobody who would want to swindle you. He doesn't come from a family of nobodies. He has a very respectable father, and as for his grandfather, he was a real jewel. All of his life, even after he became blind, he studied the Torah. And Grandmother Tzeitl, may she rest in peace, was no ordinary woman either."

"A fitting parable." I said. "It's like bringing Chanukah candles to a Purim feast. We talk about investments and she drags in her Grandmother Tzeitl who used to bake honeycake, and her grandfather who died of drink. That's a woman for you. No wonder King Solomon traveled the world over and didn't find a female with an ounce of brains in her head."'

One of the stories translated here for the first time - 'The Krushniker Delegation' - highlighted a different aspect of his work that particularly interested the history buff in me. The editors write that being written toward the end of his life, it deals with the experiences of east European Jews caught in the First World War between Germans and Poles. Elements of the traditional Sholom Aleichem are still there, but the tone and substance have changed - "...as if the great humourist is giving way before the blows of modern history." There is a dark edge to his writing that surfaces and has a knack of almost catching the reader off-guard.

From the story 'Once There Were Four' - a frame tale (with the author as one of the eponymous characters along with three of the greatest Jewish writers of the age) in which four "anecdotes" on the subject of forgetting reveal how even those great writers are revealed as ordinary, anxious Jews, faltering and trembling in ordinary, if not humiliating circumstances:

"There are moments you want to forget, to blot out from memory - but it is impossible. We forget what should be remembered and remember what should be forgotten. That, in a nutshell, is the moral of the story. Now it's someone else's turn."

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.½

Il libro rapresenta il tentativo collettivo di un gruppo di scrittori della sinistra democratica di rilevare i problemi nascosti che hanno fatto del Medio Oriente la scena di un sanguinoso conflitto che dura da decenni. Riflessioni ed il conflitto arabo-israeliano.

A collection of shorter-than-average but not microscopic stories, generally between two and eight pages in length -- stories condensed down to their essence. They depend not on plot but on excellent craftsmanship. Because of their length, the stories often take on a parable-like or dreamlike quality; for that reason, they linger long in the mind after reading.

Especially pleasing is the number of international authors included in this anthology, and the mixture of well-known and lesser-known writers, many of whom are difficult to find in English. Alongside Kafka and Tolstoy (both masters at this type of story) are Heinrich Böll's "The Laugher", Sherwood Anderson's "Paper Pills", Giuseppe di Lampedusa's "Joy and the Law". The variety of styles and subject matter is also excellent. On a personal note, I was also thrilled to see the last story included was Luise Valenzuela's "The Censors" which I read years ago in an English class and has stayed with me since.

NO OF PAGES: 360 SUB CAT I: American Jews SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: The authors have searched out and presented extraordinary firsthand accounts that run the full gamut of Jewish-American ghetto life-the sweatshops and synagogues, the pushcarts and parks, the street corners and schools, the sordid realities & glowing dreamNOTES: SUBTITLE: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America 1880-1930

From Woody Allen to Jerome Weidman

A history of immigrant Jews in America taken from original documents and photos

Stories of the 19th/20th century, Europe and America by Aleichem, I.B. Singer, Peretz, Opatoshu

A collection of Yiddish poetry translated into English. The introduction gives an explanation of the growth and use of Yiddish and its place in literature

One feels after finishing many of these 38 very short pieces that they are ultimately mystery stories, not as in, Whodunnit?, but as in "what the hell just happened?" The editors, Irving and Ilana Howe, have a special fondness for ambiguity. All of the authors are world class, but with occasional exception the stories are not so well-known. My favorite effort was Doris Lessing's "Homage for Isaac Babel," so I was disappointed to find that the actual Isaac Babel story in the collection--The Death of Dolgushov--didn't do much for me. Overall, a few hits, a few misses, and a lot of head-scratchers.½

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

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.

A good collection of short stories that can be carried in the pocket for easy reading.

3137. World of Our Fathers, by Irving Howe. (read Dec 17, 1998) This is a 1976 book I have long considered reading and finally did. Its jacket subtitle--not repeated on the title page--is "The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made." This is a great sociological study--I was surprised to find it so interesting, since a sociology course I took in college bored me to tears--and is about a world so different from my rural, Catholic background. Some parts of the book did not interest me--the Yiddish theater is no great interest of mine, for instance--but reading the book was an experience and most worthwhile. How many people in this country still speak Yiddish as a first language, does anyone know? How many still speak it?

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.

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