Unfinished People:
Eastern European Jews Encounter America
By Ruth Gay
Norton, 310 pages, $27.50
While the immigrant experience is common to most Americans–even to those many generations removed–that of the Eastern European Jews who came to New York City in the early years of the century was a particularly poignant one. That is because, writes historian and journalist Ruth Gay, so many of those immigrants came as children or teenagers “wedded to the culture they had brought with them and its language, yet not really adept in it”–the “unfinished people” of her title.
Gay grew up in the 1920s and ’30s, the child of parents who were part of that great wave of immigration. In her 70s, she writes, “I sometimes feel like one of the last who actually heard and spoke Yiddish, who participated in this life and did not just hear about it in Borsht Belt jokes.”
“Unfinished People” is a graceful book, part memoir, part reportage, underlaid with a sensitive and thoughtful analysis. Looking back at her parents’ immigrant generation and her own generation, Gay writes that “much of the intensity and hysteria that became the hallmark of Jewish family life was less extravagant warmth and love” than a reflection “of the fear and double incompetence” of the child-immigrants, “double because they had not been able to master either of the cultures in which they lived.”
As adults, Gay writes, that “fear and double incompetence” impacted in a touching way on their children who “early came to recognize this incapacity as, at an early age, they were required to read and interpret notices” that “would throw the parents into panic.”
There is an ambiguity to certain anecdotes that Gay relates from her childhood. In her parents’ apartment in Brooklyn, there was no furniture in the dining room, just a tasseled lampshade hanging from the ceiling. Their stationery store had failed in the early years of the Depression, and the dining room remained bare, “a reminder of failure or hope.”
But there is unalloyed delight in some memories. After the failure of the stationery store, Gay’s parents opened a kosher-style delicatessen. While Gay’s mother supervised the kitchen, “the actual cooks came successively from a bewildering variety of national backgrounds,” the most exotic of whom was Chinese. “It seemed,” Gay remarks, “as if you didn’t have to be an observer of the 613 commandments to cook a Jewish meal.”
Ultimately, Gay writes, the true destiny of the Eastern European Jews of her generation was shaped by the tragedy their parents had escaped–the Holocaust. “It became evident that the world out of which most of the immigrants had come had been destroyed along with its inhabitants.” Thus “unlike other peoples, who could depend on a home country to continue their language and culture, the Jews in America suddenly realized that they had inherited an awesome responsibility.” That responsibility of maintaining the memory of a lost world has rarely been better fulfilled than in “Unfinished People.”
