Author's Introduction
Countless stories have been written about Russia by travelers, professional journalists, diplomatic attachés and representatives of various governments. Those books may be grouped in three classes, namely: first, those sympathetic to Russia for political or commercial reasons; second, those written by Jewish apologetic writers, picturing and lamenting the eternal struggle of their brethren in the land of their birth, and their cruel oppression by the Russian authorities; and third, those of anti-Semitic views, in which the outstanding figure is the Jew, painted as a base and corrupt character in the community.
The dramatic biography of Ben-Zion and Leah is true to life, unvarnished and without any sugarcoating, described an eyewitness. It depicts the lives of a majority of Russian Jewish immigrants of the early 1880s, who came to America. While fortune smiled on many of these immigrants and they soon acquired wealth and even positions that enabled them to write their lives with golden letters on the pages of New World history, still these successful ones were only a small minority. The majority, like Ben-Zion, failed in their efforts to acquire a decent competency, a failure which was mostly due to their tenacious loyalty to their faith and conscientiousness in their religious activities. This became a stumbling block to their material success in life. Of this class Ben-Zion’s life was a typical one.
Right at the outset David lays out his most incriminating condemnation of his father: that his “loyalty” to his Jewish faith was the primary cause of his inability to find material success in the United States. It is hard to square this severe judgment with the true story of the writer, a life-long leader of his synagogue who dutifully honored all the Jewish holidays and devoted most of his writings to Jewish history and Biblical text — and criticized those who abandoned their faith entirely. For David there was a middle path that was the path to be pursued, one that combined the “essential” ingredients of Jewish life with a secular modernism that adapted itself to contemporary American priorities.
