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Thirty years after the first edition was published, Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side: A Retrospective and Contemporary View, Second Edition (Fordham University Press) was released earlier this year. The author Gerard Wolfe shows how the Jewish community took root on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 19th and early 20th century by focusing on these beautiful buildings and houses of worship. It was Dr. Wolfe’s walking tours on the Lower East Side early 1970’s that led to the renovation of many synagogues in the neighborhood, including the Eldridge Street Synagogue. The Tenement Museum on Orchard Street hosted Dr. Wolfe for a signing and launch event for the book on 19 November 2012. These photos were taken from that event, and a visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage earlier that day.

• Gerard Wolfe signs copies of Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

   

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• Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

   

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• Packed house for the Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side launch event at the Tenement Museum

   

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• Fans at the Tenement Museum.

   

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• Gerard Wolfe told the story of the book, which was first published in 1978.

   

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• Gerard Wolfe at the Tenement Museum.

   

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• Fans at the Tenement Museum.

   

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• Gerard Wolfe’s wife Cecilia.

   

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• One of the book’s photographers, Jo Renee Fine, signs books.

   

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• Fordham University Press director Frederic Nachbaur with Oxford Director of Client Services Kurt Hettler.

   

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Gerard R. Wolfe, Ph.D., is an architectural historian and former professor and administrator at New York University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He was the first to offer historical/architectural walking tours of the Lower East Side, beginning in the early 1970s. He is the author of The Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side: A Retrospective and Contemporary View, Second Edition.

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The post Gerard Wolfe at the Tenement Museum appeared first on OUPblog.

An up-front disclaimer of sorts: Myra Wolfe is a close friend of mine. Close enough that I'd almost be willing to perjure myself and say really nice things about her book even if it was only so-so. Luckily for me, I don't have to whitewash a single word in this review of her forthcoming debut picture book, Charlotte Jane Battles Bedtime, illustrated by Maria Monescillo.

Shall I tell you why I love this book all for its own self? I believe so - and I feel a list coming on:

1. I was not a girly girl when I was young. Oh, I wore dresses on occasion. (Heck, I am of an age that when Easter rolled around, I wore a hat and little white gloves along with my Easter dress, roll-down lace-trimmed white socks and patent leather Mary Janes. Those of you who are scratching your heads asking "But aren't you Jewish?" aren't confused - I am. But I wasn't always. And boy have I digressed. Ahem . . . ) But I was more likely to be found up a tree than in a rocking chair, more likely to be making mud pies than having a tea party, and far more likely to be pretending to be a soldier, cowboy, or pirate than I was to be playing Barbie dolls or pretending to be a princess (unless, of course, I was a pirate princess or something similar).

2. As a result of #1, I have a soft spot for things like girls in drag (one of my favorite tropes, as long-time readers know) or girls in non-traditional roles. Like little girl pirates. Especially little girl pirates who have an eyepatch-wearing teddy bear named One-Eyed Tom.

3. I love excellent words and the use of wordplay. This is, again, no surprise to long-time readers and to those of you who know that I'm a poet. Check out the image and text from the first spread in the book:

Charlotte Jane the hearty came howling into the world with the sunrise.

"Arr. She's finer than a ship full of jewels," said her mother, smiling.

"Arr," agreed her father.

"Also," said her mother, "she's got oomph."

"Formidable oomph," said her father.

Into the woods, It’s time to go,
I hate to leave, I have to, though.
Into the woods- It’s time, and so
I must begin my journey.

Into the woods  And through the trees
To where I am Expected ma’am,
Into the woods
To Grandmother’s house-

Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim for Into the Woods

Author Kevin J. Hayes has been very busy writing American Literature: A Very Short Introduction, but he needs your help. Find out what you can do below. Check out his past posts here.

In a contribution to Esquire in 1972, Tom Wolfe called autobiography “the one form of nonfiction that has always had most of the powers of the novel.” The study of autobiography has since emerged as an important field in American literary history. Of course, some of the major works in the discipline — Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography comes to mind — have received serious critical treatment for decades. More recently, many other autobiographical writings have been recognized for their literary artistry.

With his comparison, Wolfe was not necessarily saying that autobiographers fictionalized their life stories. Some undoubtedly do, but for most autobiographers, the writing process is a matter of selection, not creation. They start with the various events that shaped their lives and choose the ones they want to shape the story of their lives. Franklin, for example, omitted or downplayed some famous events in his life to emphasize ones displaying himself as a humble and hardworking printer. He made himself into an example to be imitated. The scheme worked. His autobiography is the prototypical story of the self-made man. To a certain extent, all autobiography offers examples for emulation.

Franklin’s may be the most important autobiography in American literature, but the genre seems significant enough to deserve its own chapter in my forthcoming American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. I have received such good responses from my earlier blogs that I am anxious to hear what you have to say about autobiography. I intend to start with Franklin and then flashback to the seventeenth century to discuss Puritan spiritual autobiography, captivity narratives, and slave narratives. After that, I need help with structure and content. I would like to subdivide the chapter into different types of autobiography. What other categories are significant enough to deserve separate subsections? Should I include a section on presidential memoirs? (Does that mean I’ll have to read Bill Clinton’s My Life? What am I getting myself into?) Who else’s autobiographies should I include? What do I do about ghost-written or co-written autobiographies?

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By Anatoly Liberman

I received a few questions in connection with the runic alphabet. Not everybody realizes that the origin of various scripts is as hard to trace as that of the most exotic words. According to the evidence at our disposal, people always borrow scripts; yet someone somewhere must have been the inventor! The Greeks owe their script to the Phoenicians, and the Romans got their inspiration from the Greeks. The runic futhark was hardly used before the beginning of the Common Era, though some scholars trace it to a remoter period. Be that as it may, no inscriptions antedating the end of the second century C.E. exist in Scandinavia. Therefore, the Roman alphabet, to say nothing of the Greek one, is older than the futhark. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

A correspondent found the sentence (I am quoting only part of it) …stole a march on the old folks and made a flying trip to the home of… in a newspaper published in north Texas in 1913 and wonders what the phrase given above in boldface means. She notes that it occurs with some regularity in the clippings at her disposal. This idiom is well-known, and I have more than once seen it in older British and American books, so I was not surprised to find it in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). To steal (gain, get) a march on means “get ahead of to the extent of a march; gain a march by stealth,” hence figuratively “outsmart, outwit, bypass; avoid.” The earliest citation in the OED is dated to 1707. As far as I can judge, only the variant with steal has continued into the present, mainly or even only in its figurative meaning. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

It is of course snuck that will interest us, but the origin of this illegitimate form should not be handled in isolation. We can begin with sneak, a verb whose recorded history is relatively short. The earliest examples with it turned up about four hundred years ago. Old English had snican “creep,” with short i, and this form could have yielded sneak, just as Middle English crike, from Scandinavian, yielded creek. But for snican to become sneak, it had to pass through the stage sneek (such is the phonetic regularity), which has not been attested. (more…)

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