Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America

By Ruth Gay

Book Overview

This is an account of the emigration of three million Jews from Eastern Europe to America between 1880 and the outbreak of World War II. They were mostly young, single and uneducated, but filled with hope of a new life in a new land. The newcomers maintained a sense of community longer than most immigrant groups, although culturally they were uncertain, clinging to fading memories of home, and not yet able to enter American life.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393039919
• ISBN13: 9780393039917
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.
• Length: 310 Pages
• Weight: 1.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.3" x 6.8"

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.