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4pJoseph Zalmonah By Edward King LEE AND SHEPARD, 1893. 365 PAGES. Like Hollywood or comic books, the union movement in America wasn’t an entirely Jewish phenomenon, but Jews played pivotal roles from early on. One typical mover and shaker was Joseph Barondess (1867–1928), an immigrant who organized a cloakmaker’s union as a young man and later went on to participate in the founding of both the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Hebrew Actors’ Union, among other accomplishments. The eponymous hero of Edward King’s only Jewish, and his last, novel, Joseph Zalmonah, shares much more than a first name with Barondess: King, a nonJewish newspaperman at the New York Morning Journal, based almost every detail of Zalmonah’s life and personality on Barondess’s. King did diverge from Barondess’s story somewhat in insisting on the absolute purity of Zalmonah’s goodness. A charismatic speaker in half a dozen languages, Zalmonah is a hero to every impoverished Jew in New York, completely incorruptible (offered a bribe, he says, “I scorn and spit upon them”), self-sacrificing in his duty to the point of asceticism, and handsome, to boot. Imagine a Jewish Robin Hood, but with less of a sense of humor, and that’s a reasonable approximation of Joseph Zalmonah, who comes complete with a Little John–like sidekick, a pushy pushcart vendor named Ben Tzion who isn’t above smacking a few sweatshop owners around. Zalmonah’s enemies include not only the “sweaters” and industrialists who exploit poor Jews, but also the “party of force”—socialists and anarchists who believe nothing short of a violent uprising will help the poor and that unionism delays the inevitable revolution. In opposing Zalmonah to these two parties, King attempted to show his readers—presumably gentile Americans—that Jews could be something other than frightening communists and greedy capitalists. King’s plot chugs along with more verve than one might expect from a book about trade unionism: a narrow escape from a burning tenement, a mysterious baby, and a visit to a phony “wonder rabbi” amp up suspense, while Joseph fends off the temptations of a gorgeous femme fatale assigned to win him over to the socialists. Minor characters include a proverb-spouting impresario of the Yiddish theater, a “poet of the people” who sparks a riot with a sentimental ballad, and a tragic host of pious laborers fated to suffer in the misery of the sweatshops. King’s good intentions and reportorial acumen notwithstanding, he doesn’t always nail the details of Jewish life in late-19th-century New York, but his fanciful or sentimentalized versions of Yom Kippur, Purim, Passover, and quotations from the Talmud are themselves fascinating in the perspective they provide on what a smart, sympathetic non-Jew could make of Jewish culture toward the beginning of the massive wave of immigration that would change the country forever. Further reading: There’s not much out there to read about King, and his novel hasn’t been a darling of criticism. Arthur Bullard’s Comrade Yetta (1913) is 17 Titles American Jewish Fiction a similarly idealistic portrait of a leftist, in this case a woman; see also Beatrice Bisno’s Tomorrow’s Bread (1938). Readers curious about Jewish proletarian and left-wing culture in general should consult Irving Howe’s cultural histories, such as World of Our Fathers (1976). For a more recent scholarly history focused on Yiddish-speaking milieus, see Tony Michels’s A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (2005). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5pYekl and The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto By Abraham Cahan DOVER PUBLICATIONS, 1970. 240 PAGES. As editor of the Forverts, which he built up into the most widely circulated Yiddish-language periodical of all time, Abraham Cahan introduced his immigrant readers to the wonders of America, from slang to baseball to trade unionism. Before he took that fateful job, though, he had already made a name for himself doing the exact opposite thing: writing stories about Jewish life for non-Jewish readers, in shockingly elegant English (for a man who’d lived in another language into his 20s). Published before the beginning of the 20th century, Cahan’s early fictions— the novella Yekl (1896) and the collection The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (1898)—are skillful and sympathetic Jewish counterparts to the local color tales of rural America, which were routine exercises in exoticism in the waning years of...

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