Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and MetroWest Book

I guess I wanted something a bit more sociological, or more rigorous. Helmreich went to some archives and flipped through his Philip Roth collection, added some of his personal experience and wrote the kind of rambling and bittersweet version of the story that you might get if you worked in a Jewish old age home and were a very good listener. Actually, no, I think Helmreich should have done more of that himself, although there does seem to be flashes of oral history in his account and the occasional survey or statistical study does poke its nose in. I also had the feeling that after getting so much cooperation from the MetroWest organization he didn't want to be all that critical so his history does this thing: what ever happened in the past was ultimately for the good, because look how great everything is now! Which is not so terrible when you are writing about the centralization of charity organizations or changes in synagogue leadership but I get annoyed when he is writing about breaking unions that were too communist or about the fate of certain anti-Zionist personalities. Fortunately, the biggest thing in the history of Newark's Jews -- the Riot -- is handled well and Helmreich makes no bones about the fact that Jewish 'white flight' had already passed the tipping point in Newark before the riot. Still, I liked reading this book even if it was at times slow going and it is definitely useful if you plan to spend any amount of time with Jews in Essex County of a certain age, so you can hold your own when the baloney starts flying. Judging from some of the excerpts in here, maybe Philip Roth wouldn't be such a terrible novelist to read after all. I'll get to him when I finish with Amiri Baraka.