By the time I came on the scene in 1954, the Jewish Lower East Side was basically finished. I don’t mean to irk former Grand St. neighbors or more recently arrived denizens, but those who yearn nostalgically for the “good old LES” most likely had little firsthand experience of the real thing.
Irving Howe’s epic history of the East European migration to the United States, and of the LES as a landing point, is decidedly not a work of nostalgia. His evocative “World of Our Fathers” wraps up a good few years before my bar mitzvah when I was 13 by describing the dismal
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