Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: The Story of a California Jewish Community

Kann, Kenneth L.

ISBN 10: 0801428076 / ISBN 13: 9780801428074

Editore: Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1993

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Hard cover in very good condition. No dust jacket. General shelf and handling wear, including minor blemishes to boards, bumped corners at the head, with rubbing and light discolouration noted. Within, pages are firmly bound, content unmarked. CN.

Codice articolo 623936

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: The Story of a California Jewish Community
• Editore: Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y.
• Data di pubblicazione: 1993
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0801428076
• ISBN 13: 9780801428074
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Condizione: Very Good
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: No Dust Jacket
• Tipo di libro: Used
• Cataloghi dei venditori:
  • Culture/Civilization/Society

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

Given its tumultuous history, one would hardly have expected Petaluma, California, to become transformed into the San Francisco bedroom suburb that it is today. It had been a small-town agricultural community, where Jewish chicken ranchers and radicals enjoyed a vigorous Yiddish cultural life, maintained intense political commitments, and took part in sharp conflicts among themselves and with the society beyond.

In this unique work of oral history, Kenneth Kann has ingeniously arranged and edited interviews with more than two hundred people, some of them telling their life stories in their own Yiddishized English. We meet an array of striking characters and families of three generations—East European immigrant settlers, their children, and their grandchildren.

The narrative begins with the immigrant generation's flight from the Old World and traces the immigrants' long, uneasy adjustment to life in America. It describes the dilemma of the members of the second generation, who find themselves torn between the ways of their parents and the gentile world around them. The book concludes with accounts of the third generation, who feel distant from their grandparents but who struggle to recover lost ethnic roots and are uncertain how to raise their children.

In this compelling chorus of voices, we find a Jewish Communist who describes being tarred and feathered in the 1930s and his grandson, recalling his own encounters, during the anti-war movement of the 1960s, with the grandchildren of the vigilantes who carried out the earlier assault. An immigrant proudly explains why she taught her children Yiddish, and a grandchild scolds his parents because they did not. One young woman finds the Jewish community too gossipy and confining; another is warmed by its closeness.

The cast is vibrant, their words both touching and often hilarious. Comrades and Chicken Ranchers is a delight.

Informazioni sull'autore

Kenneth L. Kann practices law in San Francisco. He is also the author of Joe Rapoport: The Life of a Jewish Radical.