Irving Howe

Kenneth Libo

A classic exploration of the American Jewish experience by one of our greatest twentieth-century intellectuals Winner of the National Book Award, 1976 World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century. This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a paperback edition, which includes a foreword by the noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

World of Our Fathers

Joseph Singer

With a large cast of characters, this is a social novel, a family saga set against the rise of capitalism and of a Jewish bourgeoisie in Lodz. It tells the story, through an interwoven plot, of the clash between old traditions and growing desires.

The Brothers Ashkenazi

An indispensable collection of one of America's most outspoken and original critics of the second half of the twentieth century Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe's enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society. A Voice Still Heard is essential to the understanding of the passionate and skeptical spirit of this lucid writer. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It shows how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. Howe's voice is ever sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny, revealing Howe as that rarest of critics--a real reader and writer, one whose clarity of style is a result of his disciplined and candid mind.

Selected Essays of Irving Howe

A Voice Still Heard

Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America’s most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe’s work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe’s enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society. A Voice Still Heard is essential to the understanding of the passionate and skeptical spirit of this lucid writer. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It shows how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. Howe’s voice is ever sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny, revealing Howe as that rarest of critics—a real reader and writer, one whose clarity of style is a result of his disciplined and candid mind.

Totalitarianism in Our Century

1984 Revisited

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) within the U.S. Department of Justice presents FBI case documents regarding Russian Jewish revolutionary Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) in PDF format. The case file is provided as part of the FBI's Freedom of Information Privacy Acts (FOIPA) Web site.

Leon Trotsky

David Bromwich

The classic investigation of the role of revolutionary ideas in fiction. Mr. Howe establishes the role of the political novel and traces its growth into the twentieth century; he explains why American novels failed to integrate ideology; and he discusses political fiction after World War II. "An intelligent, penetrating, lucid, graceful, persuasive, and altogether splendid book." New Republic. With an Introduction by David Bromwich."

Politics and the Novel

Essential Works of Socialism

A candid, perceptive narrative of the author's East Bronx childhood, his education, and his experiences and activities as an increasingly influential writer, editor, and teacher

An Intellectual Autobiography

A Margin of Hope

The National Book Award–winning, New York Times–bestselling history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a “brilliant” account of their stories (The New York Times). Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan’s teeming tenements. Like others before and after, they struggled to hold on to the culture and community they brought from their homelands, all the while striving to escape oppression and find opportunity. They faced poverty and crime, but also experienced the excitement of freedom and previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s, they were assimilated into the great melting pot as the Yiddish language slowly gave way to English; work was found in sweatshops; children were sent to both religious and secular schools; and, for the lucky ones, the American dream was attained—if not in the first generation, then by the second or third. Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, World of Our Fathers explores the many aspects of this time and place in history, from the political to the cultural. In this compelling American story, Irving Howe addresses everything from the story of socialism, the hardships of the ghetto, and the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed scores of garment workers to the “Borscht Belt” resorts of the Catskills in colorful and dramatic detail. Both meticulously researched and lively, it is “a stirring evocation of the adventure and trauma of migration” (Newsweek).

The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made

Ilana Wiener Howe

Collects a variety of stories, which are each no longer than eight pages, by authors, including James Thurber, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Leo Tolstoy

An Anthology of the Shortest Stories

Short Shorts

Essays from four decades discuss contemporary literature, socialism and communism, the Jewish experience, and other subjects

Selected Writings, 1950-1990

These 26 stories reflect the changes that occurred with age-old Jewish traditions came into contact, in ways that resulted in either conflict or fusion, with the ideas of the New World.

Jewish-American Stories

Franz Kafka

Summoned to take up the position of a land surveyor to the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his duties.

The Castle

Thomas Hardy

Reviews and evaluates Faulkner's major works, noting recurrent social and moral themes and the role of the Southern tradition in his creation of events and characters

A Critical Study

William Faulkner

This book, first published in 1979, is a representative sample of some of the best articles that have appeared in DISSENT, the American democratic socialist quarterly. They provide a two-sided view of political and social action with the democratic society of the USA.

Irving Howe

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