In the years following World War II and peaking in the 1960s, the industrial city of Paterson, New Jersey, fifteen miles northwest of Manhattan, was home to over 30,000 Jews out of a population of 140,000; nearly a quarter of the city census.  Many were descended from skilled European weavers who had arrived at the turn of the century and helped remake their new home into America’s “Silk City.” Many others were Holocaust survivors who settled there to live miraculous second lives among their kinsmen in the new world. By the approach of the new millennium, this entire community had vanished from the city, almost without a trace.

These works of fiction contemplate the arrivals and departures of this lost world. Resemblances to individuals living or dead are entirely coincidental, with two exceptions. The New York City teachers’ strike of 1968 became national news and was momentous enough to warrant its own documentary voice, some of which can be heard through Miss Turner’s cousin and on archival recordings still available via National Public Radio. Later in the collection, few readers will fail to recognize the late founder of the Jewish Defense League, whose philosophy has been quoted verbatim.

Paterson was America’s first planned industrial center, founded by Alexander Hamilton to provide the “useful manufactures” needed by a modern, independent nation. The city powered the American ascent for a century and a half, contributing everything from the gun that won the west to the engine that launched the age of air travel.

Always a magnet for immigrants, some thirty languages are heard today in the city’s school system. Hebrew and Yiddish are no longer among them. To hear those, you now go to the surrounding suburbs and further, where the various Orthodox communities live in numbers that would have raised the eyebrows of the Reform and Conservative Jews that helped build Paterson’s golden age.

One day, another ethnic or religious group, speaking whatever language, will look back with nostalgia or relief at this same adopted city that they too have left behind. But the Jews can no more forget Paterson, and so many enclaves like it, than forget that they live in America. For them, the “old country” has a more contemporary geography.