THE REST OF US"": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

by Stephen Birmingham ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 30, 1984

Juicy tales of Sam Goldwyn, David Sarnoff, Sam Bronfman, Helena Rubinstein, Meyer Lansky, and other Jewish buccaneers of the ""Poland to polo"" breed--otherwise known as the Sammy Glick strain of America's East European Jews. Birmingham plays them off, with relish, against the German-Jewish gentry he portrayed in ""Our Crowd "": the book opens with a set-piece confrontation between Lower East Side school superintendent Julia Richman and immigrant parents suspicious of her Uptown attempts to deghettoize their children. Collectively, he places them in the context of Scarsdale-bound success. Individually, he celebrates their undersize excesses--the ingeniousness, the gambling instinct, the explosive tempers and ""internecine warfare,"" the sheer chutzpah. (""As Goldfish said to Lasky, 'We've never produced a picture, and DeMille has never directed one. We should be great? "") This is admiration tinged with mockery--in the constant reminders of name-changes, the repeated references to Canadian bootlegger/distiller Bronfman's forlorn hopes for a knighthood. (Or to what Ralph Lauren's Russian-born parents ""think of little Ralphie Lifschitz, who used to play stoopball and stickball in the Bronx."") It's Social history swamping social history: the World of Our Fathers left blithely behind. Even on those terms, some aspects are crude: nothing justifies the space devoted to the headline 1905 marriage of ex-cigar-roller Rose Pastor and maverick Social Registerite Graham Stokes, her flaky (?) Communism and obscure end. On the other hand, Birmingham has rich anecdotal and dramatic material in the story of Meyer Lansky, his gambling genius, tony bootlegging, gentlemanly gangsterism, Irgun-and-Israeli arms smuggling. (For B., criminals outclass radicals anyhow.) Denied citizenship by Israel, hounded by US authorities who couldn't convict him, Lansky drew ""life imprisonment in Miami Beach."" (The book's biggest heart-tug: his sanitized, West Point son decides--to the old man's horror--to name his son Meyer Lansky II.) Not by a long shot all ""the rest of us"": reportedly, what Birmingham's Jewish friends asked for a book about, after ""Our Crowd."" But prime social-vaudeville entertainment--give or take some caricatures, some romanticizing and derision, that have as much to do with the author and the genre as the subject.

Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION