Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America

By Ruth Gay

Book Overview

Nearly three million Jews came to America from Eastern Europe between 1880 and the outbreak of World War I, filled with the hope of life in a new land. Within two generations, these newcomers settled and prospered in the densely populated Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods of New York City. Against this backdrop, Ruth Gay narrates their rarely told story--a unique and vibrant portrait of a people in their daily trials and rituals--bringing alive the vitality of the streets, markets, schools, synagogues, and tenement halls where a new version of America was invented in the 1920s and 1930s. An intimate, unforgettable account, Unfinished People is a singular act of expressing in words the richly textured lives of a resilient people. A touching and funny evocation...marvelous in its detail.... This is history as day-to-day living--irrevocable and unforgotten.--Alfred Kazin

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393322408
• ISBN13: 9780393322408
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Interview by proxy

If you were too young and/or stupid to interview your grandparents from "the old country", here's your chance to learn about what it was like for them to emigrate to a strange new country while still a teenager. Thoroughly readable, informative, and enjoyable. Will enhance your respect and deepen your love. You will see pieces of your own family, your own history

Every Day Life

I am not Jewish. I do not have any Jewish friends. I live in Kentucky and I doubt that there is any Jewish people within miles of me. I wanted to find out more about their culture. This book was excellent. It dealt with the issues that I wanted to know about the every day ones. What they wore, what they ate, their household customs. I enjoyed reading how they were scared to send their children to camp. I liked the part where the women were always cleaning and to have bed bugs was the ultimate shame.

Educating and entertaining.

I read this book to better inform myself on the every day lives of the Jewish immigrants. I am searching my husband's Jewish ancestors and was pleasantly educated during the course of the book on the lives of these immigrants in New York City; their every day comings and goings, customs, work places, religious practices and the heavy influence their "pre-immigration" lives had on their new situations.