The Jewish East Side, 1881-1924

This book, originally published as The Old East Side, is a collection of literature and documents ranging from the autobiography of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and the novels of Abraham Cain to the reporting of William Dean Howells and the fictional reconstruction of a vanished world by Henry Roth. The world is that of the old shtetl transplanted to a new, growing country, where "the ghetto" (in the years 1881-1924) was an unstable mixture of nostalgic elements and the pressures of American economic and social reality.