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“East River” is a novel by Sholem Asch, first published in 1946, and a New York Times bestseller of that year. Unlike the denser Jewish pockets of the lower East Side of New York, East 48th Street by the river was, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, an international neighborhood made up of Orthodox Jews, Catholic Irish, nostalgic Poles, chauvinistic Italians, all hungry, all overworked, all insecure.
But although these folk were all, so to speak, melting in the same pot, they were kept at a certain distance from one another, by their inherited prejudices, the most pernicious of which were supplied by their religions. To allow them to live together and work together toward a happier life, and to turn them from their European pasts toward a high American future, they needed, in Asch’s view, the religion of love. And the same religion was needed to get the bosses and workers together in the garment industry, so as to end the sweatshops, the subcontracting system, and destructive strikes.
Set in the diverse, impoverished neighborhood of 48th Street and the East River in Manhattan, during the years before World War I, Asch’s novel is a captivating tale of the inevitable and wrenching consequences of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Christians.
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SHOLEM ASCH (1 November 1880 - 10 July 1957) was a Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States.
Born Szalom Asz in Kutno, Poland as one of ten children, he received a traditional Jewish education. As a young man he followed that with a more liberal education obtained at Włocławek, where he supported himself as a letter writer for the illiterate Jewish townspeople.
He moved to Warsaw, where he met and married Mathilde Shapiro, the daughter of the Polish-Jewish writer, M. M. Shapiro. Influenced by the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), initially Asch wrote in Hebrew, but I. L. Peretz convinced him to switch to Yiddish.
He attended the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference of 1908 and traveled to Palestine in 1908 and the United States in 1910. He sat out World War I in the U.S. where he became a naturalized citizen in 1920. He then returned to Poland and later moved to France.
His book Kiddush ha-Shem (1919), telling of the anti-Jewish and anti-Polish Chmielnicki uprising in mid-17th century Ukraine and Poland, is one of the earliest historical novels in modern Yiddish literature.
A celebrated writer in his own lifetime, a 12-volume set of his collected works was published in the early 1920s. In 1932 he was awarded the Polish Republic’s Polonia Restituta decoration and was elected honorary president of the Yiddish PEN Club.
He visited Palestine again in 1936, and returned to settle in the United States in 1938.
Asch his last years in Bat Yam near Tel Aviv, Israel but died in London in 1957 aged 76. His house in Bat Yam is now the Sholem Asch Museum. The bulk of his library, containing rare Yiddish books and manuscripts, including the manuscripts of some of his own works, is held at Yale University.
