The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation (Dover Books on New York City)

This book is a story of people in a place. The people were Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from Eastern Europe, mainly between 1880 and the mid 1920's. The place was the Lower East Side of New York City, where the great majority of them settled, at least for part of their lives. Within this period there came into being not merely a typical ethnic enclave, with its own language, food, institutions, and forms of entertainment and worship, but a virtual civilization in itself. For many years, extending well beyond the era of immigration, the Lower East Side was one of the capitals - at times the foremost capital - of the worldwide culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews. The legacy of this culture has made its way into the American mainstream in many forms, although the old geographical source has been largely, though not entirely, abandoned. Signs of that tradition of popular vitality remain all over the neighborhood - not only in continuing Jewish manifestations, but also in the bustling presence of more recently arrived ethnic and cultural groups. What are the geographical outlines of the lower East Side? By the broadest definition, it is an area bounded on the north by East Fourteenth Street, on the west by the southward-running line consisting of Third Avenue, the Bowery, and St. James Place, and on the south and east by the East River. If we are focusing here on a Jewish enclave, however, then we must make some geographical modifications. Certain sectors along the East River waterfront we always mainly Irish, as much more of the Lower East Side had bee prior to the large Jewish influx. Another group predominant in the area before this influx, the Germans, established a stronghold north of Houston Street, which retained its identity as "Dutchtown" until the First World War.