All Alone, Without Money, No Language--Just Yiddish": An Immigrant's Letters from Missouri to Galicia

Authors

Nicholas Eshelman, University of Connecticut - StorrsFollow

Document Type

Article

Abstract

In June 1891, Shimshon Gerye, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia (a region that now falls across the border of Ukraine and Poland) living in Sedalia, Missouri, received a letter from a cousin back home. The content of the letter was probably rather mundane (a request to send money, inquiries about health), but its timing was somewhat unusual: in the thirty-five years that Shimshon had been living in America, this was apparently the first he had heard from his family in Europe. What survives of the ensuing correspondence, written in Yiddish and spanning a one-year period, provides an interesting view of the situation of the immigrant and the pressures of assimilation, as well as the Yiddish language in America at the end of the nineteenth century.

Comments

Reprinted with permission from Gateway magazine, Volume 26, No. 1 (C) Missouri History Museum, 2005.

Recommended Citation

Eshelman, Nicholas, "All Alone, Without Money, No Language--Just Yiddish": An Immigrant's Letters from Missouri to Galicia" (2005). Published Works. 14.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/libr_pubs/14