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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the
shtetl
past; it threatened the Jew in areas in which he had been most
secure and did not threaten him in areas in which he had been most vul–
nerable. " In America," my grandmother used to tell me, "they kill us
with candy."
Howe begins his history of the Eastern EuropeanJewish encounter with
America with the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II
in 188l. This was the signal that set in motion the great migration to Amer–
ica, just as it was the event that gave impetus
to
the small but growing Zionist
movement in Russia. The story of the migration has been well-documented,
and Howe draws upon the richness of the Yiddish sources not to repeat what
we already know, but to create a composite portrait of an experience which,
no matter how singular it seemed
to
the immigrants, was essentially collec–
tive. But while "Toward America" is fascinating, the true power of
World
of Our Fathers
is not really developed until the long second and third sec–
tions , "The East Side" and' 'The Culture of Yiddish ."
In "The East Side," the isolation and astonishment of the new immi–
grants is portrayed through a composite of recollections. In large part, the
Jewish immigrants were simply experiencing what other non-English speak–
ing immigrants had experienced . It was not poverty that plagued them,
since they were conditioned to poverty . But the
shtetl
world had broken up
and what took its place was the Lower East Side. The immigrants who came
between 1881 and 1905 were the lost souls, the
farloyrene menshn,
of the
Yiddish world . Even today, in the rapidly dwindling population of the
,iddish-speaking world, it is a generation which possesses an awesome
moral currency. To mention the first wave of immigrants is to evoke images
of a world so strange, so hostile, that survival as Jews simply could not be
assumed. And yet, America was-and Howe takes great pains to show
this-generous to the new immigrants. Ultimately, the majority managed
to find work,
to
begin the process of acculturation,
to
lift themselves up
economically. And they were treated relatively decently by those who, like
the Irish, and the German Jews , had themselves arrived in America only a
few decades earlier. It is in Nathaniel Hawthorne's words that Howe sum–
marizes the condition of the first immigrant generation . " In this republican
country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always
at the drowning-point."
But the sense of loss overwhelmed them. Russia, the land from which
they had fled, became a kind of inverted passion, a cultural barometer by
which all else was measured. No matter how raw and cruel and brutalized
life had been there, it possessed the stamp of the familiar. "I am overcome
with longing," Howe quotes one of the early immigrants, " not only for my
Jewish world, which I have lost, but also for Russia ." Only one among the
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