The Tenement Saga: The Lower East Side and Early Jewish American Writers

Folding childhood memories into an academic study, author Sternlicht (Student Companion to Elie Wiesel and Chaim Potok: A Critical Companion) delivers readers to a distant world with which he is still exceedingly comfortable. Sternlicht's volume is divided into two parts: the first gives a history of the Lower East Side from approximately 1882-1924--the years of a great wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to America; the second presents a critical study of 14 early Jewish American writers. From the outset, the author dives deep into the sights, sounds and smells of his childhood as the son of Jewish immigrants, discussing among other things, the popular Yiddish newspapers and theaters in his community, the exhausting task of doing laundry by hand on a cast iron stove and, in what he nevertheless calls a ""small space of hope,"" the dangers of growing up on the Lower East Side. ""The ghetto existence outside my door was brutal,"" Sternlicht writes. ""Teenage boys and even grown men terrorized and robbed little boys."" Sternlicht's volume is at its best when the author is a party to the action, lending an air of otherwise unachievable authenticity to the account and bringing those interested in Jewish, urban and literary history into the fray. In the latter half of his book, Sternlicht's expertise in early Jewish American literature is evident by his detailed discussions of such classics of the period as Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Michael Gold's Jews without Money, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers and Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky. Sternlicht calls these masterpieces ""cultural artifacts linking the immigrant community to the wider world,"" a body of literature giving voice to a ghetto-stricken community. Placing these works in the context of the poor yet vibrant community of Jewish immigrants that bore them--a community seeking to simultaneously assimilate, prosper and maintain some of its Old World culture and religion--the author's analysis works well to complement his intimate history of the period.