The Jewish Week:
Joshua Lubliner, a journalist in his native Ukraine, became a window washer when he immigrated to New York in 1922. Each weekday, he’d get up at 4 a.m., gulp down a raw egg or two and leave his Brooklyn home for a full day of work. Upon his return, his nightly ritual was to sip tea with sugar cubes and read the Jewish Daily Forward — the Forvertz, as the Yiddish newspaper was known — in its entirety, clipping articles of interest for his personal scrapbook.
In the years following his arrival in New York, Lubliner was one of about 250,000 readers of the Forward, then the largest Yiddish newspaper in the city. For him and other immigrants, the Forward was a necessity, their link to America and to the world they left behind. In a new book and exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, the Forward is seen as a guide, a source of news, entertainment and advice. To look back at its pages, as the exhibition suggests, is to look through a window into life among New York’s Jewish immigrant community.
Published on the newspaper’s 110th anniversary, “A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward” edited by Alana Newhouse (Norton) includes about 500 black-and-white images, drawn from the newspaper’s archives, covering the immigrant community and beyond. Beautifully produced, the book is full of pictorial treasures, some works of art for their composition, others simply capturing a moment in time, whether a meeting of the century club of the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Dorchester, Mass.; Sophie Tucker showing off a hand of cards; Jewish watchmen on guard in Palestine, dressed in Arab clothing; a portrait of a young David Ben-Gurion and his wife Paula; “Six Chums of Biala,” as it was originally captioned, a portrait of six women, all named Ida, sitting proudly in straw hats, neighbors in Biala, Poland, who all immigrated to America; or the window of the now-closed landmark Ratner’s restaurant on the Lower East Side.