Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (review)

Ironically, it may have taken a well-placed, if less than charitable, review of Hasia Diner’s Lower East Side Memories to prove, beyond any doubt, her most salient point about the power that immigrant hub continues to play in American Jewish conscious ness generations after it ceased being the largest Jewish community in the entire world. In November 2000, several weeks after the book appeared, the New York Times granted this slim volume—really a long, if thoughtful essay—a major spot in its Sunday book review section and gave a reviewer license to essentially give his own take on what downtown’s legacy meant to him. While quick to aver that he did not want to “put too much emphasis on my own left-wing political nostalgia,” he was also sure to credit the spirit of Socialism that once pervaded its streets during the neighborhood’s heyday, with insuring that this renowned enclave would remain special, meaningful, and enduring to American Jews. Seeing the Lower East Side as this lost social justice utopia, he was dismayed that the ghosts of radical thinkers and writers did not loom large in Diner’s analysis and that she did not share his emotions and sensitivities.

But, in taking Diner to task for not focusing on “his” Lower East Side, the reviewer evidenced this imaginative historian’s most essential finding. So many Jews use or rewrite the history of the Lower East Side—each in their own way—to project what they wish their group’s life was, or should have been. And, for themselves, Times editors could not resist according this modest effort the type of space usually reserved for future best-sellers or the most controversial of works. Seemingly, recollections of what the Lower East Side represents could not be evaluated sufficiently within the “Books in Brief” section. Ordinarily, when dealing with Jews, only books on the Holocaust, a very different type of memorial touchstone, get as much room in the paper.

For myself, I am basically satisfied with Diner’s explanation of what has permitted American Jews to filter out of their minds the dirt, disease, delinquency, and desperation that was also part of the downtown immigrant experience and to speak with such reverence of the newcomers’ neighborhood as a very special, almost wondrous, world of group cohesion. It makes sense that a mobile people ensconced, and doing so well, in a land of freedom, but lacking historical rootedness, would seek a place to call their own. And, the American Jew’s search for such a site, whether he lived in San Antonio, Texas or she dwelled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was directed to the Lower East Side by Manhattan-centered publishers and Hollywood writers and directors, not to mention university scholars. (Actually, Diner’s book got me thinking about how I teach a survey of East European migration to America. After establishing the why and how immigrants chose America, I have always, almost instinctively, offered a geography lesson of the changing New York downtown as representative as how all new American Jews first encountered the new world’s urban landscape. Later on in the semester, before I segue to analyzing “migration out of the ghetto,” I do touch on “alternate immigrant destina tions.” But, these places, by definition, are always alternatives to New York’s Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side. I too have put the Lower East Side on the highest pedestal.)

Still, for all the hyping of the Lower East Side as a surrogate and symbolic first home for America’s peripatetic Jews, what may ultimately give that neighborhood its enduring power is a simple, prosaic, actuarial reality. If between 1885 and 1899, 417,000 Jews arrived in this country through the port of New York and if, in 1913, some 77,000 did likewise, and large proportions of both cohorts stayed, at least for a while, in the immigrant hub, before fanning out elsewhere...