Eternal People
Published by University Press of Colorado
Sample | Reviews | Purchase
Eternal People
is at once an unconventional love story, an account of a little known group of Jewish immigrants to the West, and an addition
to the literature of idealistic movements in 19th century America.
Based on original research, the novel follows the adventures of Joseph Abrams, a university student home on vacation who
leaves Russia in panic after the murder of his family during a pogrom. Suddenly alone in the world, Joseph travels by
way of New York to Wisconsin, where his only surviving relative, an uncle, lives on a commune founded by Am Olam, a group of
Russian socialists who have come to America in an attempt to escape the terror and prejudice of their native land. Along the
way, Joseph forms and alliance with the visionary editor, Abraham Cahan, himself a former member of Am Olam. In time,
Joseph becomes both a correspondent for Cahan's newspaper, The Jewish Daily Forward , and the leader of the commune.
What begins as an idyllic adventure, soon develops disturbing overtones as Joseph and his fellow comunards discover that hatred
and misunderstanding can also exist in America. As dangerous as their enemies from the outside, however, is the distrust and jealousy
that develops within the commune which soon faces the possibility of extinction forcing Joseph and the others to take decisive action in order to survive.
Rich with emotional nuance and filled with period detail, Eternal People is a fictional record of chances taken and lives fully lived. Yet is is
much more than a story about either farming or Jewish immigration, for the novel's true subject is the necessity of dreaming and the inevitable complexity
of love. Few readers will remain unmoved by the novel's powerful conclusion or its dramatic presentation of life on a little
known American frontier.
A selection from "Eternal People"
The train stopped only briefly in Gays Mills, and almost before Yosl could get his satchel and
climb down, it was moving slowly away in a dignified rain of dust and cinders, at once decorous
violent. Even the train seemed in a hurry to leave Wisconsin, cross the Mississippi, and get to
the Great Plains.
For a moment, Yosl stood expectantly, looking at other passengers
who had gotten off, the stationmaster, the carts and wagons that were
being loaded with grain and dry goods. The dusty air tickled his nose and
made his eyes water. Then he understood: there was no one to meet
him. He hadn't wired his time of arrival. He wouldn't have known whom
to wire. Suddenly, he felt more alone than ever. Before, he had a destination,
and the long trip took on its own rhythm, making him feel a
part of something, even if it was only a train full of strangers. Now he had
arrived, but he had no idea where he was. He picked up his suitcase
and followed the hanging dust of a wagon into town.
Gays Mills spread away from the Kickapoo River, meandering as the river did,
its blocks marching in oblong patterns until they petered
out into the prairie that stretched away in all directions. As many people
were walking as riding, and Yosl ienjoyed the hot summer sun on his bare head and back.
Brick buildings alternated with stone of a pale, sandy color; raw pine tenements
marked the boundaries between them. Wood sidewalks ran the length of the three-block
Main Street, and now the dirt road became crowded with horses, wagons, and pedestrians,
all jostling each other for position.
The town was no bigger than a large shtetl, but though Yosl saw no Jews, here, unlike
Russia, the gentiles did not seem threatening. They moved past him on the sidewalks
as if he weren't there, and that made Yosl feel wonderfully, limitlessly free to do as he
liked, to be whatever he would become.
It seemed remarkable that at the age of nineteen, when he should have been at university,
he could get on a train in New York and ride a thousand miles across the country to a small
town without having anyone demand anything of him. There were no internal passports or identification
papers, no suspicious guards or physical examinations, not even unfriendly passengers.
Was it possible that this was at last a world free of anti-Semitism? Here, it was possible to think
so. Loneliness would be a small price to pay. Yosl shouldered his pack and asked directions
of a man sweeping the steps of a dry goods store.
"New Zion?" the man repeated, querulous at first, then comprehending. "You must mean the
Russians. Just walk outside town five miles. It'll be on your right."
Yosl smiled and thanked the man. Only in America, he thought, could a Jew be confused with
a Russian.
Reviews
"The 19th century produced a plethora of idealist movements
that found particularly fertile ground in the new frontiers of America, an adventurous, unspoiled
land in which the dream of Utopia seemed an achievable and noble goal.
Jews, of course, were far from immune to this lures of the ideal. The European Zionist movement
certainly displayed utopian aspirations, but the Jewish desire for a just, equitable and functional
society was not limited to the goals outlined by Theodor Herzl.
The promise of America was just as alluring to Jewish idealists as it was to many other Americans
of the period who strove for a better social environment. The Am Olam movement, created and operated
mostly by immigrant Russian Jews, was fueled by the same pogroms and endemic European anti-Semitism
that inspired Zionism, but it focused exclusively on an American stage of its experiments.
It is within the rustic, idealistic and insecure environment of new Zion- an Am Olam agricultural
colony on Wisconsin's Kickapoo River- that Colorado author David Milofsky (a magazine editor and
English professor at CSU) has set his moving novel Eternal People.
Milofsky has gone to great lengths to portray his fictional colony in an accurate and historic context.
With an economical and realistoc approach, he succeeds in capturing both the physical hardships
of the rich, if sometimes naive, philosophical foundations that created such communities. The
discussions between his Jewish characters provide fascinating glimpses of an ideological stew
which really has no modern counterpart. One hears not only the powerful influences of Torah Judaism
and chasidism, but the thoughts of Thoreau and Emerson, and, with Olam's socialistic bent, even echoes
of Karl Marx.
A book set in such a millieu, obviously, runs the risk of becoming a wooden stage, with philosophical
discussion miring and burdening the novel's essential drama and struggle. Fortunately, Milofsky
proves himself enough of a novelist to avoid the trap, painting his main characters- youthful
immigrant Joe (Yosl) Abrams and Lizzie- with bold and clear strokes. Through the eyes of this couple
and an assortment of other interesting, well drawn characters, the reader experiences both the
hardships and rewards of life in New Zion.
As these idealistic Yiddish-speaking Americans rise to the challenges of agriculture, the perils
of floods, the familiar pain of anti-Semitism and the very unfamiliar comfort of non-Jewish support,
Eternal People becomes a powerful and engaging story.
-Chris Leppek for "Intermountain Jewish News, December 11, 1998