This book, originally published as The Old East Side, is a
collection of literature and documents ranging from the
autobiography of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and the novels of
Abraham Cahan to the reporting of William Dean Howells and the
fictional reconstruction of a vanished world by Henry Roth. The
world is that of the old shtetl transplanted to a new, growing
country, where "the ghetto" (in the years 1881-1924) was an
unstable mixture of nostalgic elements and the pressures of
American economic and social reality.
The productivity, both intellectual and material, of the section
of New York known as the East Side during those forty years around
the turn of the twentieth century has become a legend among many
Jews in this country and deserves to become better known to many
more of other ethnic origins. The lower East Side was paradoxically
a wilderness to be traversed and a portion of that "promised land"
which had been glimpsed with so much hope from afar. To wonderfully
talented and observant children, like Jacob Epstein, the streets
there in the 1880s were as filled with excitement as those of the
Arabian Nights. To serious philosophic young men like Morris
Raphael Cohen, they were as challenging as the marketplace of
Athens had once been to Socrates to achieve intellectual
enlightenment and the improvement of the social order.
The conditions of abominable crowding and poverty described in
the sociological tracts of Jacob Riis, Lillian Wald, and others are
better known perhaps to the average reader than the accounts of
such pleasures as the dancing schools, the Yiddish theaters, the
cafes, the lectures, the literary ferment and activities, described
in the pages of Abraham Cahan and Hutchins Hapgood. But all the
views presented in The Jewish East Side, both dark and bright, are
recognizably parts of the same picture. This book will be of value
to sociologists, historians, researchers specializing in Judaic
studies, and students of literature.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(2)
