World of Our Fathers - Annotated by Irving Howe (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

World of Our Fathers traces the journeys 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 paperback edition, which includes a foreword by the noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

Review Quotes

"A great book"-- "New York Times Book Review"

"A history and celebration, memory and judgement... an act of redemption"-- "New Leader"

"Irving Howe has written a great hook. Those who are not Jewish can still read a marvelous narrative about two generations of "bedraggled and inspired" Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond in virtually all of their social and cultural hearings and in most of their political and economic ones. A work of history and of art, "World of Our Fathers" is brilliantly organized and paced by brisk, pithy chapters that make up large perspectives--the detonations of new hopes and renewed fear that drove the immigrants out of the Russian Pale after the assassination of Alexander II and the pogroms that followed; the wretchedness and culture shock of the first two decades in New York; the daily family and work life in the filthy, noisy, flaring streets off East Broadway; the dynamics of the Jewish labor movement and of the culture of Yiddishkeit and the rapid, fated dispersion into America."-- "New York Times"

About the Author

Irving Howe (Author)
Irving Howe (1920-1993) played a pivotal role in American intellectual life for over five decades, from the 1940s to the 1990s. Best known for World of Our Fathers, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism. He was the founding editor of Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years.

Morris Dickstein (Foreword by)
Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre and Senior Fellow of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of several books, including Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970