Hasia R. Diner. Roads Taken

This study of one aspect of Jewish economic activity in the long nineteenth century is not only innovative and insightful, but engaging too. In flowing prose, Hasia R. Diner presents the reader with a vivid group portrait of the hundreds of thousands of modern Jewish migrants who began their lives in their new homes by walking the roads with a pack from which they sold goods door-to-door. The figure of the Jewish peddler was not unknown before this book, yet it had never really been submitted to critical scholarly gaze. Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way is thus the first monograph to do this. Diner’s source base is extensive and in at least three languages. From these materials, particularly memoir literature (much of it unpublished) and the press, she extracts a wealth of fascinating details on which to base her conclusions.

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Genealogy · Judaism · Memoir · Portrait · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies