"The Rest of Us"

The last in Stephen Birmingham's trilogy of books recounting the immigration of European Jews to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how they succeeded in the New World. This one follows "Our Crowd" and The Grandees.

Throughout there is the larger immigrant experience--the flight from Europe, the tenement lives, the move into better neighborhoods and suburbia--told with a narrative flair certain to win many readers., While the territory has been well mined, Mr. Birmingham has discoveries guaranteed to surprise... Trenchant observations permeate this book. The way they take your breath away makes this the literary equivalent of a cardiac arrest.

Stephen Birmingham (1929-2015) was an American author of more than thirty books. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he graduated from Williams College in 1953 and taught writing at the University of Cincinnati. Birmingham's work focuses on the upper class in America. He's written about the African American elite in Certain People and the prominent Jewish society in "Our Crowd" The Great Jewish Families of New York, The Grandees: The Story of America's Sephardic Elite, and "The Rest of Us" The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews. His work also encompasses several novels including The Auerbach Will, The LeBaron Secret, Shades of Fortune, and The Rothman Scandal, and other nonfiction titles such as California Rich, The Grandes Dames, and Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address.