Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures in New York's Lower East Side (review)

Mario Maffi, a professor of American literature at the State University of Milan, acknowledges at the outset that his scholarly interest in the Lower East Side is closely tied to an “intense relationship [that] developed between me and that neighborhood” from the time of his first visit in 1975 (p. 7). His emotional attachment to the district and its people is apparent in a prose style and interpretation that at times seem more romantic than real.

Through his visits to the Lower East Side and through research in an impressive number and variety of primary and secondary sources, Professor Maffi has discovered that Americanization, contrary to what he erroneously believes is a common notion, was not a one-way street but rather involved cross-cultural exchanges. This study, he informs us, is not a history of the Lower East Side but an analysis of multi-ethnic and cross-cultural experiences in the district during two periods, the last three decades and the years 1880–1930. This sounds like and reads like history to this reviewer. In fact, the book’s six titled chapters are concerned almost exclusively with the period 1880–1930. Only the fifty-page “Introduction” and the ten-page “Afterword” deal with recent decades.

There are things to admire in this work. The combination of the author’s personal experiences and solid research result in a fascinating view of the Lower East Side of recent years. The reader is presented with a depiction of the area as complex and multifaceted as ever, with its sizable Puerto Rican community, expanding Chinatown “more and more Asian-American than simply Chinese” (p. 25), East Village cultural scene, pockets of gentrification, and its continuing role as “territory of memory” for those seeking out the world of their fathers. In recalling the Lower East Side’s past he has made liberal use of quotes from primary sources to draw vivid, if sometimes overly florid, word pictures of life and labor. His treatment of the garment industry, its union movement and strikes, while offering no new interpretations, is very wide-ranging in its coverage. So too is his depiction of cultural life. It is in Chapter Six that Professor Maffi provides a rather unique and fascinating perspective of the Lower East Side, that from the outside looking in as depicted by social reformers like Charles Loring Brace and Jacob Riis, by journalists like Hutchins Hapgood, by novelists like Stephen Crane and William Dean Howells, by painters of the Ash Can School, by photographers and by the emerging film industry.

Unfortunately the weaknesses of this book outweigh its strengths. There are numerous instances of overgeneralizations and inaccuracies about the nature, motives and activities of immigrant groups. I will refer to but a few. To limit the cause for German emigration, as the author does, to political repression ignores the reality that for thousands economic problems provided the motive force. On page 118 Profesor Maffi states that Jewish wives were “often deserted” by their husbands. How often? On that same page he writes, “By and large, Jews arriving in New York before 1900 were skilled workers.” Yet on page 145 he describes Russian and Polish Jews arriving in the 1890s: “This new unskilled immigration supplied the first cheap, mass labor indespensable to the clothing industry. . . .” There is little discussion of religious life in the immigrant communities. The author implies that only the Orthodox Jews observed dietary laws and religious festivals, providing no idea of the range of religious commitments and practices among the Jews. Professor Maffi often makes reference to growing inter-ethnic contacts and the emergence of a mass culture, yet the evidence is, to say the least, thin. Can one really accept the notion that ice cream parlors were “crossroads of culture” (p. 85) or that immigrants from different ethnic enclaves enjoyed the humor of the Irish theater? Were they so adept in the...