Introduction

By all accounts Irving Howe was surprised by the overwhelming success of World of Our Fathers, his monumental study of Eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States. When he tried to explain his book's enormous popularity, he came to the conclusion that the public's reception of the work was motivated by impulses similar to those that had led him to write the book in the first place: the need to say goodbye to a culture and to the generation that had brought it to this country. He explicitly rejected the idea that his readers were drawn to the book by "any authentic desire to 'find their roots,'" and indeed remained deeply suspicious of the ethnic revival movement of which his book seemed to be a part. ¹

But as Hasia Diner and Matthew Frye Jacobson both point out in this issue, World of Our Fathers contributed mightily to the ethnic revival, among both Jews and non-Jews. Howe was too cynical about the book's meaning, Diner argues. In fact, American Jews had a deep interest in the story that Howe told, not only because it resonated with their past, but because they wanted to use that past as they constructed an identity for the present and the future. In a way that surprised Howe to no end, World of Our Fathers became part of the normative canon of American Jewishness. And as Jacobson shows, the book resonated well beyond the Jewish community, with people who had no Yiddish-speaking forebears to commemorate or say goodbye to. Indeed, "authentic" or not, the desire to enrich American life by acknowledging the contributions of cultures outside of the supposed mainstream has proved an enduring one. Whatever Howe may have thought, Jacobson posits World of Our Fathers as a founding document of multiculturalism.

In any case, Howe may not have been completely ingenuous when he claimed that all he meant to do with the book was bid farewell to the past. As Gerald Sorin and Tony Michels both argue, the author hoped to use his history to "salvage" what he saw as the best values of the immigrant generation. To the extent that American Jews took his story to heart Howe hoped that they would also place at the core of their Jewish identity the ethos of social solidarity and the paradoxically universalistic particularism that formed the unique heritage of the Yiddish-speaking immigrant community.

And American Jews certainly did take Howe's story to heart. The impact of World of Our Fathers was much greater and more subtle than Howe ever expected. It strongly influenced the communal memory of American Jewry on all levels. American Jews even folded their own individual stories, and those of their families, into the contours of Howe's narrative. Sometimes it was startling the degree to which their own experiences resonated with those of the immigrants whose story Howe told. How does one explain the eerie similarity between an incident related by Howe and the following passage from the reminiscences of a Philadelphia man who recorded his oral history in the years after the publication of World of Our Fathers? Howe's account:

At the age of five I really knew Yiddish better than English. I attended my first day of kindergarten as if it were a visit to a new country. The teacher asked the children to identify various common objects. When my turn came she held up a fork and without hesitation I called out its Yiddish name, a goopel. The whole class burst out laughing at me. ²

The Philadelphian's story:

I even used to confuse Yiddish and English. I remember I once went to this kid's birthday party, I must have been five, six years old-and they're having birthday cake. I dropped my fork, and I said, "Can I have another gappel [sic]?" Everybody looked at me and said: "What's [sic] the hell's the matter with him? What's a gappel? ³

Did the two men simply have...