Going to America, Going to School: The Jewish Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-of-the-Century New York City

The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) early childhood initiative is located in two of our New York City community schools, Primary School (PS) 5 and PS 8, in the Washington Heights section of northern Manhattan. This initiative was conceived as a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and CAS. The collaboration brought newborns and their families into the schools in which the children would complete fifth grade. The initiative began in 1994 and has been in full operation since 1996. Since then, the need for such a project has been confirmed and experience has provided insights into how a program for pregnant women and children through age five (often called a Zero to Five Program) can be effectively implemented within a public school. The CAS Zero to Five model connects two federally funded programs—Early Head Start (birth to age three) and Head Start (ages three to five)—to provide comprehensive educational and social services to low-income families and their children. The population attending the Zero to Five Program confronts the obstacles facing all new immigrant families living in poverty in an urban setting. In both schools more than 75% of the families are from the Dominican Republic; another 20% come from other Central and South American countries. The parents’ language is Spanish, and language barriers and acculturation issues result in social isolation. In addition, because many residents lack legal documentation, they are reluctant to access health and social services. The few early childhood programs in the neighborhood all have long waiting lists. A majority of the families share overcrowded apartments with other families or extended family; whole families often live in one bedroom where books and age-appropriate toys are scarce and there may be little child-centered language interaction. However, in spite of the difficulties, these parents have a drive to succeed and they understand the importance of education. By combining and linking Early Head Start and Head Start programs and integrating them into a community school, the CAS Zero to Five Program provides children and families with quality educational, health, and social services, after which the children transition into public school classes within the same building.

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Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904–1991)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1628-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Ben Furnish

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

New York City ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

York City ◽

Jewish Life ◽

Religious Study ◽

Jewish Immigrant ◽

Entire Life ◽

Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽

German Jewish

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi. He grew up between 1908–1917 in Warsaw and from 1917–1921 in Bilgoray (Biłgoraj), which shaped his knowledge of small-town Jewish life. The younger brother of Yiddish writers Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, Singer began reading secular literature at 10, and after years of religious study, he eventually followed his brother into Warsaw’s bohemian literary Yiddish community, translating several modern writers into Yiddish. Singer’s first novel, Der Sotn in Goray [Satan in Goray], set in seventeenth-century Poland with the background of pogroms and the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, appeared in 1934, and the next year, he joined Israel Joshua in New York City where both wrote for the Yiddish press. In 1950, Singer married Alma Haimann Wassermann, a German Jewish immigrant from a once-wealthy family, who supported the couple by working as a retail clerk. Singer wrote in Yiddish for his entire life; most of his novels were serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward Yiddish newspaper. Unlike most great Yiddish writers, he found success in translation, particularly after Saul Bellow’s translation of the story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ appeared in Partisan Review in 1953.

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