Reviews

In this vivid and informed account, Gay (The Jews of Germany) explores the lives of Jews who fled Eastern Europe and settled in New York City between 1881 and 1911. She describes the poverty and persecution these Jews lived with in Europe and documents the ways in which the relative freedom of the New World impacted upon their language, culture and religious practices. Gay's major focus is on the reminiscences of her parents, both turn-of-the-century childhood immigrants, and her own memories of growing up in a Yiddish-speaking Bronx home. Using evocative descriptions of the furniture, cooking and dress of the period, Gay conveys how immigrants of her parents generation were forced to negotiate between the language and customs of their own parents and the English-speaking world they found at school and at work, and how newfound freedoms coexisted with the unforeseen difficulties of assimilation. (Nov.)

Nine out of ten Jews who left Eastern Europe during the 40 years that bracketed the turn of the century chose the United States. Most came through Ellis Island to New York, where three out of four remained. Most were also young, single, uneducated, and unskilled; many were children. These immigrants were "unfinished." They had not mastered the stylized, static, and traditional world they left before they encountered the baffling life of a mushrooming foreign metropolis. Gay (The Jews of Germany, LJ 8/92) here weaves an absorbing account of that life by combining history and her personal reminiscences as a child of immigrant parents. In chapters prosaically titled "Floors," "Laughter," "Chairs," "Hats," "Food," "Corsets," and "Beds," Gay provides a glimpse into Jewish immigrant life absent from most historians' accounts. In the new world, while clinging to parts of the old, the "unfinished" immigrant arrival tried not to appear as a griner-a greenhorn. This highly readable volume should have wide appeal.-Nicholas C. Burckel, Marquette Univ., Milwaukee