Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America [Hardcover]

Ruth Gay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1996

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. For many, New York provided a refuge, for in its densely-populated, Yiddish-speaking enclaves, it was possible to keep in touch with customs from the old country. Through hard work, humour and storytelling, Eastern European Jews maintained a sense of community longer than most immigrant groups, but as a new generation born in America grew up, married and moved out of the neighbourhood, customs gave way to change.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ruth Gay's writing traverses the paths of history from the microcosm of personal memoir to millennial histories of peoples and nations. In The Jews of Germany, she traced one and a half centuries of Jewish life in Europe. In Unfinished People, Gay describes the lives of Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe and the process through which they forged new cultural identities in America. The materials for Gay's examination of Jewish life range from historical essays to personal remembrances. Short vignettes describe the role of Yiddish theater, the changing fashions of dress and family life, and her studied opinions on Jewish-American history and identity. Her opinions are sharp and her exposition is lucid and informative.

From Publishers Weekly

In this vivid and informed account, Gay (The Jews of Germany) explores the lives of Jews who fled Eastern Europe and settled in New York City between 1881 and 1911. She describes the poverty and persecution these Jews lived with in Europe and documents the ways in which the relative freedom of the New World impacted upon their language, culture and religious practices. Gay's major focus is on the reminiscences of her parents, both turn-of-the-century childhood immigrants, and her own memories of growing up in a Yiddish-speaking Bronx home. Using evocative descriptions of the furniture, cooking and dress of the period, Gay conveys how immigrants of her parents generation were forced to negotiate between the language and customs of their own parents and the English-speaking world they found at school and at work, and how newfound freedoms coexisted with the unforeseen difficulties of assimilation.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 310 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (December 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393039919
• ISBN-13: 978-0393039917
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,716,705 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interview by proxy, August 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America (Hardcover)

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

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Educating and entertaining., September 28, 1997

By 

Robin L. Poses (Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America (Hardcover)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars A revelation about my family and perhaps yours as well, August 12, 2011

By 

A. D. Chotin (Annapolis, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America (Paperback)

Not long after beginning this book I exclaimed out loud "that's Aunt Ethel, that's Aunt Sophie". In her book Ruth Gay explains how an entire generation of immigrants who left Europe as children or teenagers had never actually "finished" growing up and how that affected them, their lives in the New World and their children. I wonder how much of this is true for today's immigrants as well. I truly enjoyed this book, more than most I have read of the genre, and strongly recommend it to anyone seeking to understand their immigrant past.