Come with Me to Babylon
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Book Overview
In 1910 the Cohen family, in search of the Golden Medina, undertakes a dangerous journey from Russia to the United States, where the new world exposes family secrets, cultural conflicts, the corruption of the American Dream, and love's divides. Traveling in steerage to Ellis Island, the family endures the poverty and dirt of New York City and retreats to a farm in southern New Jersey--to find not the agricultural Eden they were promised, but Babylon. Told in several voices, this tale bears witness to a new generation learning to find hope in a land that often sacrifices human decency for profit and greed.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0826341780
ISBN13:9780826341785
Release Date:February 2008
Publisher:University of New Mexico Press
Length:240 Pages
Weight:1.20 lbs.
Dimensions:0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"
Related Subjects
Domestic Life Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Literature & Fiction Women's FictionCustomer Reviews
1 rating
A fictional but historically accurate tale of immigrant communities in New York and New Jersey
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 14 years ago
This novel traces the diaspora of eastern European immigrants to the U.S. eastern seaboard from their squalid voyage to Ellis Island to their residence in rat-infested apartments in the Bronx to their transfer to supposedly utopian agricultural communities in New Jersey. The protagonists, a family of Cohens, are distinctly drawn: a reflective, bibliophilic, non-working father; a manipulative mother who maneuvers her son into marrying the inane daughter of a wealthy businessman; the son's affairs with an American Indian prostitute and a neighboring Polish Catholic girl who becomes pregnant and dies from complications of an illegal abortion performed sub rosa by a physician; the son's criminal friends who avenge his bigoted neighbors' refusal to assist a drowning black fisherman after his canoe tipped over. As in all of Paul M. Levitt's novels, the characters are memorably drawn, convincingly motivated, and inextricably intertwined.
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