Book Description
The Bronsons were the first Jews to ever live in the small town of Concordia, Tennessee-a town consisting of one main street, one bank, one drugstore, one picture show, one feed and seed, one hardware store, one beauty parlor, one barber shop, one blacksmith, and many Christian churches. That didn't stop Aaron Bronson, a Russian immigrant, from moving his young family out of New York by horse and wagon and journeying to this remote corner of the South to open a small dry goods store, Bronson's Low-Priced Store.
Never mind that he was greeted with "Danged if I ever heard tell of a Jew storekeeper afore." Never mind that all the townspeople were suspicious of any strangers. Never mind that the Klan actively discouraged the presence of outsiders. Aaron Bronson bravely established a business and proved in the process that his family could make a home, and a life, anywhere. With great fondness and a fine dry wit, Stella Suberman tells the story of her family in an account that Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, described as "a gem...Vividly told and captivating in its humanity."
Now available for the first time in paperback, here is the book that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said was "forthright. . . . not a revisionist history of Jewish life in the small-town South but . . . written within the context of the 1920s, making it valuable history as well as a moving family story."
Customer Reviews:
This Story Rings True.......2007-01-28
This is an exquisitely written memoir that reads like fiction. What a talent to take what is true and create a story! In the 1920's, my grandparents ran a "Jew store" in Lawrenceville, Virgina, but left after a year during which the KKK made it known they were unwelcome. My grandfather became a "Jew peddler" in North Carolina, and much of this story rang true with the tales I was told as a child. Residents looked on the "Jew peddler" with suspicion, but also with awe because he brought the big city with him. He was expected to be sophisticated; his opinions were taken seriously. During the Great Depression, one North Caroina farmer gave his daughter to my grandfather because she was starving. He took her home to Norfolk, Virginia, to raise with his own five children, and a life-long relationship ensued.
My book club enjoyed this book and had a lively discussion.
A Southern Woman's recount.......2006-06-01
This was a definite surprise me novel. I picked it up for no other reason than the shocking title. This has become one of my favorite books, and she, a favored writer. I love how she brings the people from her childhood to life in the reader's mind, the language, the sayings, a delightful Southern Yiddish flavor. This book has been passed among friends and allowed us to have an interesting discussion with 3 generations of Southern women.
Like it was for non-Jews, too!.......2005-02-12
The authenticity of detail hit me over and again, describing not only how it felt to be Jewish in white anglo-saxon Prodestant Tennessee, but the way everyone was: open armed but not altogether open minded, graciously phrasing back-talk, helpful when you least expected it, back-stabbing the same way, and sugar-coating every topic but money. When it came to money, you didn't pay protection after the fact, like industrial cities; you first worked for permission. Fabulously The Jew Store tells this tale! True to my own memory is the white woman whose lemon merangue pie was acclaimed, only it was her cook's. The cook, called that but doing cleaning, gardening, child rearing, and everyting else. Learning to listen backwards if you wanted to know what someone was actually saying, as in "we're so glad you came over and didn't even call!" The sugar-coated talk from mean, angry men. The social standing that harked to who-knew-where... This was the small mill town I grew up in in NC, too. It produced the fragile sounding Southern-belle diction that was good for date bait 'up north,' as her daughter found out; but that belied the resolve of strong, smart women with wonderful senses of humor, as shown in her characters. Anyone who grew up in a small mill town in the South prior to -- say 1970 --- met plenty of folks just like these. How glorious to have this touching volume of remembrances.
You don't have to be Jewish to love this book!.......2004-03-27
The Jew Store is a wonderful, absorbing memoir, rich with detail about a Jewish family's experiences in a tiny, "dot on the map" southern town. Stella Suberman's vivid descriptions of her Russian immigrant parents' adjustment to this life include unflinching examinations of the prejudices and imperfections of the community they join as well as those the couple bring with them. So much happens to the family in the course of this memoir that the narrative is as compelling as a good novel. The dilemmas the family faces are so convincingly rendered--Where will Joey get the training necessary for his bar mitzvah? Will Miriam marry a gentile?--that I was occasionally moved to tears. By the time you reach the end of the book, you will miss some of these people, as if they have become part of your own story.
an unusual childhood.......2004-01-28
I read "The Jew Store" after seeing author Stella Suberman on Booktv. I was impressed with her, as she is young looking and quick thinking into her ninth decade.
Her story relates an unusual childhood, growing up in a small Tennessee town in the 20s and 30s where her immigrant parents ran a dry-goods business that catered to the lower income residents. They were the only Jewish residents, occupying a unique niche in the life of the area. Her sunny-natured, optimistic father flourished there, becoming southern in speech and outlook. The adjustment was harder for her sensitive, traditional mother. For Stella and her older sister and brother, there was no question of adjustment, as life in Tennessee was the only life they knew, and they were generally accepted and able to take root.
Suberman is a wonderful writer, as one might expect for a "retired editor" of many years experience. Her style is vividly descriptive, with a perfect balance of the characters' inward and outward lives. "The Jew Store" is a joy to read. Suberman's book deserves the highest recommendation and will appeal to readers of all ages.
Average customer rating:
- the world's foremost jewish history does it again
- Great book! For history buffs who like the personal side.
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Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores (A Kodansha Globe Book)
Leon A. Harris
Manufacturer: Kodansha Amer Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| Business & Investing
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Retailing
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Shopping & Commerce
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ASIN: 1568360444 |
Customer Reviews:
the world's foremost jewish history does it again.......2001-09-01
Ken libo has shown an excellent ability to convey jewish history time and time again.. This book is no exception.. It's very readable, and will not let you down. If you want to concieve the struggles and successes of jews and others in the early twentieth century; buy this book.
Great book! For history buffs who like the personal side........1999-06-18
This is a great book. It's chock full of history told in an easy-to-read style. Leon Harris reveals the struggles and successes of 12 of the earliest Jewish retailers of America including Levi Strauss, Sears, Roebuck, Neiman, Marcus etc. It appeals to readers on many levels. First it is an historic account of the people whose names have become so familiar as store-names that we have forgotten there were ever people with those names. "Merchant Princes" includes many personal anecdotes about the founders of the stores and their families, retailing practices of yester-year and what these merchants did with their incredible wealth. Told by a Jew, about Jews, it reveals in surprisingly candid ways the ostracism of Jews in this country addressing how this all began. It's a book you can put down and pick up at any point without losing the flow. Jews will love it. Gentiles will be impressed. I was!
Average customer rating:
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The STORE THAT MAMA BUILT
Lehrman
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
History & Historical Fiction
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ASIN: 0027546322 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from American Scholar, published by Thomson Gale on January 1, 2006. The length of the article is 3716 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Buster brown's America: how a Jew from Slovakia became a Catholic from Manhattan, then fell from grace and turned into a real American.
Author: Jiri Wyatt
Publication:
American Scholar (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 75
Issue: 1
Page: 85(8)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Average customer rating:
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The May story
Forbes Parkhill
Manufacturer: s.n
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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ASIN: B0007JKA7C |
Book Description
On May 29, 1917, Mrs. E. M. Craise, citizen of Denver, Colorado, penned a letter to President Woodrow Wilson, which concluded, We have surrendered to your absolute control our hearts' dearest treasures--our sons. If their precious bodies that have cost us so dear should be torn to shreds by German shot and shells we will try to live on in the hope of meeting them again in the blessed Country of happy reunions. But, Mr. President, if the hell-holes that infest their training camps should trip up their unwary feet and they be returned to us besotted degenerate wrecks of their former selves cursed with that hell-born craving for alcohol, we can have no such hope.
Anxious about the United States' pending entry into the Great War, fearful that their sons would be polluted by the scourges of prostitution, venereal disease, illicit sex, and drink that ran rampant in the training camps, countless Americans sent such missives to their government officials. In response to this deluge, President Wilson created the Commission on Training Camp Activities to ensure the purity of the camp environment. Training camps would henceforth mold not only soldiers, but model citizens who, after the war, would return to their communities, spreading white, urban, middle-class values throughout the country.
What began as a federal program designed to eliminate sexually transmitted diseases soon mushroomed into a powerful social force intent on replacing America's many cultures with a single, homogenous one. Though committed to the positive methods of education and recreation, the reformers did not hesitate to employ repression when necessary. Those not conforming to the prescribed vision of masculinity often faced exclusion from the reformers' idealized society, or sometimes even imprisonment. Social engineering ruled the day.
Combining social, cultural, and military history and illustrating the deep divisions among reformers themselves, Nancy K. Bristow, with the aid of dozens of evocative photographs, here brings to life a pivotal era in the history of the U.S., revealing the complex relationship between the nation's competing cultures, progressive reform efforts, and the Great War.
Book Description
This book gives us a chilling portrait of our electoral vulnerability. Written with urgency and authority.
Download Description
Hanging chads, butterfly ballots, voting felons, and Supreme Court intervention. How bad is the U.S. election system? Bad enough that at least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had registered to vote while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11! John Fund explores the way "vote brokers" stole a mayoral election in Miami in 1998 by tampering with 4700 absentee ballots. He shows how the "Motor Voter Law" allowed Californians to use mail-in forms to get absentee ballots for fictitious people and pets. He discusses the fears of Internet activists that unscrupulous "Manchurian Programmers" could manipulate new computerized voting machines to alter the outcome in 2004. After reading Stealing Elections, Dr. Larry Sabato, Director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said, "Unless we do some of the things Fund recommends, sooner or later we're headed for more disasters as bad or worse than what we saw in Florida in 2000."
Customer Reviews:
Lots of useful information.......2006-11-10
I enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. I found it to be even-handed, but more importantly, it presented a great deal of very specfic information, including recommendations to fix the system.
Thought-provoking call to action.......2006-06-23
John Fund insightfully explores the world of stolen elections - a problem no longer limited to corrupt governments on the other side of the world. It is hard to believe what is happening under our noses, so often orchestrated by those who claim to be proponents of honesty in government.
In a democracy, John Fund says Blame the People.......2005-10-24
This book properly recognizes that election shenanigans are virtually an American tradition, but slinks into pure propaganda with its implicit and explicit contention that Democrats are solely to blame. But, if there's an equivalent book out there for Democrats that focuses solely on the misdeeds of Republicans, then perhaps we all can agree that elections need protocols to determine fraud by officials, by parties, by voting equipment vendors, and by voters. And that we especially need officials with an attitude capable of protecting the integrity of elections, and not one that pooh-poohs every conceivable threat.
Fund grossly undervalues two things, greatly damaging the value of his work. First, he grossly underappreciates insider fraud. In fact, with secret vote counting now the order of the with electronic voting, economics argues that elections can and will be up for sale to the highest bidder, and we'll never know any better. Second, he grossly underappreciates the fact that ALL voting systems will be vulnerable and subject to attack, because elections have always been highly competitive events with a unhealthy dollop of dirty tricks. Because all systems can be compromised, a good voting system is inexpensive and creates witnesses and EVIDENCE when cheating happens and also has a low payoff per election crime, while a bad voting system leaves little or no evidence, and a relatively small number of people can throw the election, getting a high payoff for their election crime.
Guess what? Electronic voting leaves no evidence of hacking or rigging if it's done properly, insiders are the most likely culprits, and the payoff for a single crime can easily be the whole election. Paper ballots, while subject to felon voting, double voting and the ills Funds describes in this book, leave EIVDENCE. In fact, this is the very reason Fund is able to write a book about them! They were caught, in most cases!
In a democracy we should not be quick to blame the people as pretty soon the people may be considered untrustworthy and then we don't have a democracy any more. Instead, since voting is a right, let people freely exercise the right, and then punish AFTERWARD the abuse of that right, being careful to create systems where it's hard for an abuse to yield more than one vote. Paper ballots are easy on the tax dollar, and meet this bill. Despite the thousands of people trying to cheat the election system, it's a good system, and the rats are getting a might small piece of cheese with paper ballots. In contrast, you can see Howard Dean on the web hecking an election in less than 60 seconds. I kid you not. The only solution is total openness and observation by all parties, watching each other like hawks.
This book is a shameful attempt to ignore the real causes of election fraud.......2005-10-24
This book is nothing but a shameful and disguised attempt (notwithstanding his denials) to discredit Democratic voters and to advocate the enactment of "election reform" laws that will disenfranchise voters, while at the same time ignore and dismiss the greatest threat to our democracy today - the privatization of our elections with corporate owned electronic voting machines that count our votes using secret software and leave no paper trail for auditing them. To be more specific:
The book is filled with purported examples of illegal voters, ignoring the fact that this problem accounts for a small minority of election fraud in our country today. To remedy this problem, Fund advocates several measures that will do little to remedy the problem, while disenfranchising millions of voters, mostly those who are poor or non-white and most likely to vote Democratic. Here are just three examples, among the many cited in Funds book: 1) Disallowing homeless people to vote because they don't have a proper address; 2) Requiring a picture ID to vote - which 10% of the population lack, and which amounts to a poll tax for the poor; 3) Abolishing the extending of voting hours in situations where insufficient allocation of voting machines results in as long as 10 hour waits to vote (again, this is a problem faced mainly in poor and minority neighborhoods).
But whereas Fund is so concerned that an occasional illegal voter may slip through the cracks in our system, when it comes to electronic voting machines that count our votes using secret software, although admitting that mistakes are sometimes made, he claims that these machines cannot be used to steal elections. To prove this point he does nothing more than quote a man who works as a PR consultant for Diebold - although Fund is Careful not to mention this fact.
Engaging reporting but needs better organization.......2005-09-03
Voter fraud, intimidation, ballot-stuffing and other chicanery regarding elections has long been a sin Americans laid on the doors of other countries. But this phenomena is just as common in America, as the 2000 Florida recount and this book shows.
The author shows the different ways in which cheating occurs in elections by giving concrete, documented examples from various states since the end of WWII. Specific examples covered include voting by dead people, voting by illegals or felons, rigging of voting machines, absentee ballots that went missing, and actual ballot stuffing. The author also provides examples at the local, state, and federal level; for both legislative and executive offices..
The author emphasizes several key locales where election intrigue has a long history: Florida in general and Miami in particular, Hawaii, Chicago, Texas, and California. The author also goes out of the way to give examples of suspected cheating by both Democrats and Republicans, though leans heavily against the former.
Most importantly, the book shows how various laws have helped to increase or decrease the different kinds of voter fraud. The author concludes with a short list of reforms that could help to reduce voter fraud and other election malfeasance.
Overall, the content of the book is good, and all the examples are referenced. The problem is that the book is primarily a series of documented case stories. The author should have tried to be more comprehensive in his coverage. Specifically, the author could have included tables and charts showing how documented cases of vote-rigging change state-to-state or decade-to-decade. In the chapter on election by lawsuit, the author could have shown a timeline of how the number of lawsuits challenging election results has changed over time. In general, the author needed to provide more statistical data encompassing the nation, along with his case studies.
Even with these drawbacks, this is a good book to read, and I recommend it.
Book Description
Presenting a wide range of views and strategies, The Green Halo analyzes the problematic relations between humans and the rest of the natural world. The author looks at the views of thinkers including John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Al Gore, and suggests alternative ways to view nature, assign it value, and respond to ecological crises.
Customer Reviews:
Living Thoughtfully and Treading Lightly.......2000-01-24
This book presents the various "world-views" behind the immediate battles over ecological issues in a way that brings them alive. It shows why understanding and working through our most basic beliefs concerning what we ought to do (and be) is so important if we are to learn to "tread more lightly on the earth" before it is too late. It is a wonderfully readable introduction to ecological ethics and a rousing call to thoughtful action.
Books:
- The Journals of Captain Cook (Penguin Classics)
- The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Alone 1932-1940
- The Lost King of France: How DNA Solved the Mystery of the Murdered Son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
- The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy
- The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
- The Story of Chicago May
- The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind The Little Prince
- The Walk West: A Walk Across America 2 (Walk West)
- Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend
- Twice-Upon-A-Time: Born and Adopted
Books Index
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