From the first Yiddish writer to achieve significant popularity and a mass audience in English translation. Dozens of American Jewish novels handle the issue of intermarriage, and among the most thoughtful of these is Sholem Asch’s East River. Set in the diverse, impoverished neighborhood of 48th Street and the East River in Manhattan, during the years before World War I, Asch’s novel points up one of the inevitable and wrenching consequences of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Christians.

The plot centers on a devout Irish Catholic girl’s involvement with the Jewish Davidowsky family. Pious Moshe Wolf Davidowsky operates a grocery, but he can’t cover his bills because he extends credit to all of the neighbors - even those, like Mary McCarthy’s father (“the block’s official antisemite”), who are irresponsible drunks.

Like any good epic, East River makes room for a wide-ranging cast and a series of captivating discourses on social phenomena, including the connection between dance crazes and women’s rights, the church’s defense of child labor, and the ideologies - from communism and anarchism to Spinozist philosophy and capitalism - that enlivened American Jewish life in the first decades of the 20th century.

Asch harrowingly narrates the infamous Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, in which over 100 young sweatshop workers died in 1911, and he is equally notable as a master in rendering the everyday details of Jewish life.