Book Notes

Book Notes BOOK NOTES 187 Annotations written by Walter Hirsch of Purdue University are identified with his initials. American Jewish life AgainstAll Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America, by William B. Helmreich. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995. 370 pp. $21.95 (p). ISBN 1-56000-865-2. William Helmreich writes of the experiences of the 140,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors who came to America-their first arrival in the United States, the mixed reactions they encountered from American Jews, their choices about where to live, and their efforts to find marriage partners. California: Earthquakes and jews: A Study of the jewish Community's Response to Natural Disaster, edited by William M. Kramer. Woodland Hills, CA: Isaac Nathan Publishing Co., 1995. 270 pp. $24.00 (P). ISBN 0-914615-15-7. A compilation ofthe words ofrabbis, leaders, and congregants as they re-live their experiences, recall the community's response, and discuss Jewish theology ofnatural disasters, the book also includes prints and photos and covers the Great San Francisco earthquake-fire of 1906, the Long Beach quake of 1933, the San Fernando/Sylmar Quake of 1971, the San Francisco-San Jose quake of 1989, the Eureka quake of 1992, and the Los AngeleslNorthridge quake of 1994. jewish AgriculturalColonies in Newjersey, 1882-1920, by Ellen Eisenberg. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. 244 pp. $49.95 (c); $17.95 (p). ISBN 0-8156-2652-5. Southern New Jersey's Salem and Cumberland counties once contained the largest and most successfulJewish settlements of those undertaken by Russian-Jewish immigrants in America during the late nineteenth century. Ellen Eisenberg's work focuses on the transformation of these colonies over a period of four decades, from agrarian, communal colonies to private mixed industrial-agricultural communi- 188 SHOFAR Winter 1996 Vol. 14, No.2 ties, as the early independent, ideological settlers clashed with the financial sponsors and the migrants they hired, who did not share the settlers' communitarian and agrarian goals. Thejews ofChicago: From Shtetl to Suburb, by Irving Cutler. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995. 368 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-252-02185-1. Irving Cutler presents a history of Chicago's Jewish population from their roots in the Old Country to their present-day communities, describing their cultural, religious, fraternal, economic, and everyday life. He provides a history and sketch of each Jewish neighborhood along with biographical vignettes of some of Chicago's best-known figures. Last Order of the Lost Cause: The Civil War Memoirs of a jewish Family from the "Old South," Raphael jacob Moses, Major, CSA, 1812-1893, compiled and edited by Mel Young. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996. 376 pp. $57.50 (c); $25.00 (P). ISBN 0-7618-0080-8 (c); 0-7618-0081-6 (P). This book chronicles the lives of the Moses family of the Civil War era. The editor has compiled and expanded upon various written and photographical documentation, focusing specifically on RaphaelJacob Moses, a successful businessman and a staunch fighter for the South, and the Jewish heritage of the whole family. Rachel Calofs Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains, by Rachel Calof. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 176 pp. $20.00 (c); $12.95 (P). ISBN 0·253·32942-6 (c); 0-253-20986-2 (P). In 1894, Rachel Bella Kahn left her native Russia for a homestead on the Great Plains, engaged to Abraham Calof, a man she had never met. She was 18. This book is her account, written when she was 60 but only recently rediscovered, of her youth in Russia and of the 23 years during which she and her family struggled to survive brutal conditions on the frontier. These Are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880-1925, by Reena Sigman Friedman. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994. 314 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-87451-665-X. The large influx ofJewish immigrants into the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries signaled a change Book Notes 189 not just in American society as a whole but also in the existing American Jewish community. As the population of Eastern European Jews grew, so did the need...