To a New World E-Book

Jon Bernstein

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 18

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

One summer day in 1937, Jon Bernstein left his home in Budapest, boarded the train to Hamburg, and embarked on a journey to America. He never looked back. In a series of photos and journal entries, this hopeful immigrant recorded his reactions and impressions upon leaving his native soil and envisioning a new life on the North American continent. This book reproduces a selection of those photo, thoughts, and aphorisms, capturing forever the thrill of exploring a New World for the very first time.

Leseprobe

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

A Single Step

Crossing the Waters

The Realm of the New

Power Without Love

List of photos

Introduction

by Judy Mandelbaum

The New World. What imagery this term evokes! Whenever I hear it – which is seldom enough in these jaded times – I imagine pristine beaches, unexplored forests and mountain ranges, technologically innocent peoples living in harmony with their natural environment, and limitless opportunities for doing vast good… and great evil.

But these images belong to a remote past. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the New World increasingly came to resemble the Old and ultimately supplanted it as the center of material innovation and raw power, new images captured the popular imagination: The cowboy, the railroad and steamboat, the ubiquitous automobile, and the electrifying dream world of Hollywood. But to Europeans, entrapped in the turmoil of war, revolution, and economic catastrophe, nothing symbolized the “newness,” “freedom,” and “opportunity” of America – particularly in the darkest days of the 1930s – the way the skyscraper did. Skyscrapers were the most modern of all modern inventions. In the days before the advent of those faceless mirrored boxes that pass for modern architecture nowadays, the New York skyline of the early twentieth century promised a fresh start for a world that had come crashing down off its hinges.

It was in this spirit of unlimited possibilities unshackled from a dead and stifling past that Jon Bernstein crossed the Atlantic in 1937 and staked his new existence on the dream of renewal, American style. Bernstein (not his real name) was born in Budapest, the bustling co-capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the eve of the First World War. The son of a Jewish tailor and his Prague-born wife, he had to scramble to find his path in life after completing his advanced secondary school education.