World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made
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Price: $27.40
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Price: $27.40
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Howe Irving
World of Our Fathers Pb
 Price: $38.00 DescriptionTwo million East European Jews emigrated to the United States at the end of the last century, settling in all the major cities, but especially in New York City's Lower East Side. World of our Fathers tells the story of how they tried to keep their Yiddish culture while making their way in a new society. Irving Howe describes every aspect of Jewish life: the old country village, the Atlantic crossing in steerage, the teeming life of the East Side, the Yiddish press and theatre, the settlement houses, the garment trades and unions, the associations of old country neighbours, the various socialist groups, the synagogue and Hebrew school, the sweatshops and such disasters as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Jewish immigrant families generated artistic and political movements that affected all Americans. They played prominent roles in the New Deal social reforms and in the theatre, cinema and literature. No impulse that stirred Jewish people is omitted, and in its epilogue the author wryly reflects on their future.
Short Shorts
 List Price: Price: $3.60 You Save: $4.39 (55%) DescriptionShort Shorts is a delightful anthology of miniature masterpieces. Here are thirty-eight brief, brilliant flashes of fiction, both classic and contemporary. Each work is superb, intense, and speaks to the human condition in a profound, often provocative way–a truly outstanding collection by some of the worlds greatest authors.
The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization)
 List Price: Price: $62.76 Description"To confront American culture is to feel oneself encircled by a thin but strong presence. I call it Emersonian, an imprecise term but one that directs us to a dominant spirit in the national experience." Thus Irving Howe, America's distinguished social critic and a longtime reader of the Sage of Concord, begins this illuminating discussion of Emerson and his disciples and doubters. What is the Emersonian spirit? What inspired it, what propelled it? And what does it mean to us today? History gave Emerson his opportunity and then took it away. Coming to manhood during the 1830s and 1840s, the time of "the newness" when Americans beheld the world with unbounded expectations, Emerson became the spokesman for the self-reliant new man he believed had arisen, ready to thrust aside mossy traditions and launch a new revolution of freewheeling thought. But the rapid pace of the American experience overtook the Emersonian vision; in the 1850s, the rising problems of slavery, a boom-and-bust economy, the vulgarity of mass culture overwhelmed the idealist. His satellite spirits wavered and shrouded the Emersonian optimism: Hawthorne, with his stories of moral breakdown; Thoreau, rooted in nature yet inclined to the cranky and fanatical; Melville, his fathomless blackness waiting beneath archetypal fables of innocence and evil also Walt Whitman, Orestes Brownson, Twain--all were influenced by, yet reacted against, the Emersonian "newness." Howe identifies three kinds of response: the literature of work (Melville and Mark Twain),the literature of Edenic fraternity (James Fenimore Cooper, Whitman, Twain again), and the literature of loss (all the post-Civil War writers). He lays before us the intellectual and personal tragedy of the first great American man of letters, yet also shows that Emerson's belief in the untapped power of free men pervades not only the lives and works of his contemporaries but is also a permanent part of the American psyche.
A Treasury of Yiddish Stories: Revised and Updated Edition
 List Price: Price: $77.66 Description
Margin Of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography
 List Price: Price: $16.21 You Save: $10.74 (40%) Product Details
DescriptionA leading literary critic-and the author of World of Our Fathers-looks back on his life from the early 1930s through the 1970s. A perceptive account of Howe's intellectual growth. Index.
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