A storyteller's worlds

the long version

Shlomo Noble was born in Galicia before World War I and brought up in a traditional East European Jewish community until he came to America at the age of fifteen. Witness and memoirist, storyteller and scholar, he was an explorer of a vanished world who charts the path between that world and our own. In this engaging oral history, Jonathan Boyarin, a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, records and puts in context Noble's instructive and amusing stories of his Jewish upbringing and education in Europe and America. Noble is an extraordinary storyteller - the kind who connects us in a unique and vivid way to worlds we might otherwise have lost: the East European Jewish shtetl attempting to hold on to old ways in the face of the dislocations of World War I; the new social movements, opportunities, and conflicts arising in interwar Poland; small-town Jewish life in America as experienced by an immigrant boy during the 1920s; the life of an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva student on the immigrant Lower East Side of New York, and the texture of thought, language, and feeling ingrained in traditional Jewish learning; American universities in the years before World War II; and Los Angeles when the Brown Derby was the fashionable place to be seen.