The rise and fall of Jewish landsmanshaftn in New York during the first five decades or so of this century constitutes a topic of major importance for the understanding of Jewish folk memory and the cultural construction of ethnic identity. During the period of the great migration to the United States there surfaced the names of literally thousands of Eastern European towns and villages that became labels for newcomers anxious to form themselves. into smaller or larger groups, according to their respective places of origin, for the ostensible purpose of ensuring their social welfare. The consolidation and institutionalization of the community memories that lay behind the formation of these benevolent societies give us today the opportunity to glimpse a good sociological refraction of life in the shtetl, as well as of the so-called ‘shtetl mentality’, while the eventual disintegration of the landsmanshaftn in more recent years attests to the fading of these memories and the rise of newer preoccupations in determining the nature of modern Jewish identities. Not that this book charts such things as the romantic rags-to-riches stories or a mythologized, sentimental view of the shtetl; on the contrary, Michael Weisser's explicit aim is to convey the depth and the trauma of the migration experience as mirrored in the history of these societies, formed by those immigrants who chose to remain fundamentally unassimilated. It is a subject which has for far too long been overlooked in the ordinary understanding of Jewish readjustment in the modern world. He is to be warmly commended for this conscientious, sympathetic and highly readable study, which firmly establishes the ‘organizations of fellow countrymen’ as an essential element in the structural evolution of modern Jewish society.

While his brief, five-page Appendix on ‘The Ethnicity Debate’ reveals a certain familiarity with the current social science literature, bolstered elsewhere in the footnotes by the occasional comparative reference to peasant studies, Weisser's methodological techniques are, however, a little too diffuse for comfort. He himself admits in the Preface that his exposition rests on what he calls ‘bubbe mayse history’, viz. ‘… a mixture of facts, anecdotes, fairy tales, fables, innuendos, truths, half-truths, memories, experiences, and even some outright lies'.