World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe
World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe
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World of Our Fathers
The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made

Author: Irving Howe

Narrator: David Colacci

Unabridged: 35 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/04/2020

Synopsis

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories (the New York Times).

Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements. Like others before and after, they struggled to hold on to the culture and community they brought from their homelands, all the while striving to escape oppression and find opportunity. They faced poverty and crime, but also experienced the excitement of freedom and previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s, they were assimilated into the great melting pot as the Yiddish language slowly gave way to English; work was found in sweatshops; children were sent to both religious and secular schools; and, for the lucky ones, the American dream was attained—if not in the first generation, then by the second or third.

Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, World of Our Fathers explores the many aspects of this time and place in history, from the political to the cultural.

About Irving Howe

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Dvora on April 29, 2013

It took me an awfully long time to read this, not because I didn't like it or that it wasn't interesting, but because it was so dense. So I had to read it little by little, and not in bed at night. Dense as it was, it was well worth the time it took to read. My parents were immigrants to the US, but......more

Goodreads review by M. on February 02, 2011

This is a fascinating account of the two million East European Jews who migrated to New York City's Lower East Side beginning in the 1880's. The book describes the immigrants' attempts to maintain their Yiddish culture while at the same time, due to both external pressures and their own desires, fit......more

Goodreads review by Michael on February 22, 2023

An absolute doorstopper of a history, World of our Fathers is both wide-ranging and oddly narrow. Howe wrote this book about the Yiddish culture of New York's East Side from 1880 to 1920. The world is literally that of his parents, who were Jewish immigrants themselves, in my case it's the world of......more

Goodreads review by Adam on October 19, 2018

This book was hot during the craze for ethnic origins in the 70s, which is remarkable since it's relatively long and dense. For Howe, the culture of eastern European Jews who emigrated to America is essentially Yiddishkeit: Yiddish in language, self-consciously Jewish in identity, universalist in id......more

Goodreads review by Julia on January 01, 2018

A magisterial and sympathetic social and cultural history of the East European Jewish migration to New York City in the late 19th through early 20th centuries. Howe demonstrates a fondness and respect for these immigrants who fled violence, anti-Semitism, and poverty to America. Here they lived at f......more

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