Eternal People
A Novel
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- CHF 10.00
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- CHF 10.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
<i>Eternal People,/i> tells the story of Joseph Abrams, a Ukrainian Jew who finds his way to America at the end of the nineteenth-century. During a break from his studies in Russia, he returns to his shtetl in the Ukraine to find it is the target of a Cos
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Set in 1905 and 1906 on a Wisconsin commune populated by Russian Jews and gentiles fleeing czarist persecution, Milofsky's second novel (after Playing From Memory) draws on the socialist agrarian movement, Am Olam ("Eternal People"), founded by Jewish immigrants who believed that a self-sufficient communal life in the U.S. would protect them from anti-Semitism. But though the group espouses peace and social harmony, all is not well among the Am Olamniks. When trouble begins to brew and political factions form, the novel's levelheaded 19-year-old protagonist, Joseph Abrams (Yosl Abramovitz), is sent by a New York immigrant newspaper, the Forward, to investigate. In Wisconsin, Joseph is reunited with his wisecracking uncle Sam (Shmuel) and falls in love several times over. The crisis of the narrative comes when an itinerant preacher, Jacob Kleinschmidt, threatens Am Olam with his band of anti-Semitic thugs and Joseph finds himself elected as the commune's new leader. Careful research and historical accuracy do much to redeem the sentimentality of the prose and the gratuitous steaminess of the sex. Narrative contrivances and improbable coincidences, however, that detract from the real issues at hand: bigotry, religious fervor gone awry and the Jewish-American experience.
