The Broken Wall: Stories of the Mingling Folk

(no dust jacket) [nice-looking copy, minor wear to extremities, faint dust-soiling to top edge, white spine lettering a bit rubbed]. (B&W photographs) The "wall," as the author explains in his Introduction, is a metaphor for America's racist attitudes: "The great levelling forces of Democracy, recruited from many sources, have all halted before the racial wall. . Nowhere is this defeat more apparent than in the United States, where a tint is equivalent to a taint, a crooked nose to a crooked character, and where a peculiar slant of the eyes is taken as unmistakable evidence that the race so marked cannot see straight." Although the Simone bibliography (entry 389) mischaracterizes this book as "a collection of stories about immigrant life in the tenements of the Lower East Side," in fact most of the thirteen episodes take place in unspecified locations, including some in rural settings, and deal with multiple ethnicities. The author, a Jewish immigrant from Slovakia, was a prominent writer on immigration-related topics: a list of his "Studies of Immigration" at the front of this book lists seven titles, including this one and two volumes of autobiography, "Against the Current" (1910) and "From Alien to Citizen" (1914). A professor of religion at Grinnell College in Iowa, he was an outspoken defender of immigrants whose allegiance to the U.S. was under attack during World War I, and also a pacificist -- both of which positions made him the target of widespread condemnation for his alleged "disloyalty" after America's entry into the war.

Product Info

Publisher: Fleming H. Revell Company

Year: (c.1911)

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

Seller Info

ReadInk

Address: 2261 West 21st St. Los Angeles, California

Website: https://www.readinkbooks.com

Country: United States