Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (review)

Book Reviews 157 opens negatively, "Not an editorial-writer, bereaved with bartlett, / mourns him, the shelved Lycidas" and concludes "and lives alone, and in his secret shines / like phosphorus. At the bottom of the sea." Modernist alienation, exacerbated QY the Holocaust, leads Klein to a dead end where the earlier symmetries give way to an unbalanced silence. Ironically that silence came not long after he had found a new metaphorical voice in his fmal collection ofpoems, The Rocking Chair, where he turns to his French-Canadian surroundings and away from overtly Jewish subjects. "Autobiographical" epitomizes Klein's double vision: "Out of the ghetto streets where a Jewboy / Dreamed pavement into pleasant bible-land." Despite the powers of poetic transformation, the Jewboy struggles with his ghetto, and by the end ofthe poem the Jewboy returns listening to Hebrew violins oxymoronically "Delighting in the sobbed oriental note." For variety, the editors include some ofKlein's children's verse and his translations of a few of Bialik's poems. Klein's "A Psalm Touching Genealogy" concludes with, "And there look generations through my eyes." Thanks to these Selected Poems future generations will be able to look through Klein's eyes and hear his voice. Michael Greenstein Independent scholar Toronto Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America, by Gerald Sorin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 304 pp. $40.00 (c); $14.95 (p). Tradition Transformed represents a substantial and challenging undertaking: the synthesis into a single volume of the history of the Jewish people in America. Sorin contours his analysis around both developments internal to the history of the Jewish people in the United States and around the world, and key moments in the history of the United States. By and large he succeeds in his efforts and has produced a highly readable, engaging book. The scholar ofAmerican Jewish history will fmd little or nothing that has not been said before. In a way much that Sorin presents here is a distillation of the 1992 series, The Jewish People in America, the five volumes produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in conjunction with the American Jewish Historical Society. Sorin had already established a reputation for himself with his particular volume in that series, and Tradition Transformed does not depart from the themes articulated in those books, in greater depth, or in Sorin's own particular one. The generalist reader, which would include American historians who want to understand something about American Jewish history but know little about the subject, 158 SHOFAR Fall 1998 Vol. 17, No.1 will be well served by this book. Tradition Transformed would be an excellent choice for an undergraduate class in American ethnic or religious history. Its engaging writing style, its coherent organization, and the relatively sophisticated nuancing of its arguments will make it a handy reference work for those want to know, in a broad-brush manner, the basic outline of American Jewish history. This book also benefits from the fact that the author is also a scholar of American history. The American part of the equation does not exist here as mere context or background; rather it means that the experiences of Jews and the basic social and political developments of America dovetail analytically. This book far surpasses, in intellectual depth and honesty, in the density of sources behind it, and in its fairness to history, some of the other single books against which it will be measured, namely the far less impressive works written by Howard Sachar or Arthur Hertzberg. Sorin moved gracefully between using the book as a venue to provide readers with the nuts and bolts of American Jewish history, the facts of a particular people in their various times and places, and as a venue for an overarching analysis. Sorin took as his basic trope the generally hospitable climate that Jews found in America, always more welcoming and expansive than any of the other major centers where they found themselves. Within the context ofthat hospitality, Sorin has explored the various ways in which American Jews coped with choices and freedom. Sorin has asserted here that from the seventeenth century on until the end of the twentieth century, American Jews have creatively found...