SOURCE: A review of World of Our Fathers, in The New York Times Book Review, February 1, 1976, pp. 1-2, 28-30.

Solotaroff is an American editor, educator, essayist, and critic. In the review below, he discusses some of the major themes of East European Jewish immigrant culture presented in World of Our Fathers, particularly socialism and Yiddishkeit.

The first generation tries to retain as much as possible, the second to forget, the third to remember. Little wonder that the outcropping of American-Jewish writing in the past 30 years is so often a literature of memory, an attempt to recover the world of childhood and adolescence as the last place the trail of Jewish identity was seen before it faded into the lawns of suburbia and the bright corridors of the professions. Why this interest, though? "Why not stick to the present," as my father would say. "The farther back you go...