One Happy Jew [*SIGNED*]

New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Very Good. (c.1934). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [good sound copy, minor bumping to lower corners, slight darkening/soiling to spine cloth]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper: "For Virginia Hicks / A Happy Birthday / to you / Nat J. (Ferber / + Toni." Novel following the Marmelsteins, a Jewish family, from their little Austrian village, to Vienna, Paris, and finally New York. The narrative commences with the father resolving to take his five sons to America because he believes it to be "the one place where the Jew is spared suffering and humiliation merely because of his inevitable heritage" (which he describes elsewhere as "the curse of which they will never be rid"). Alas, four of the five turn their backs on their father's dream, some adopting other religions, others marrying to gain wealth -- all but one, Pincus (the book's title character), who stays true and marries a nice Jewish girl. The author, a journalist throughout the 1920s, was the one-time husband of anarchist/activist Marie Ganz, with whom he collaborated on her 1920 autobiography "Rebels" (also available from ReadInk); by the time this book appeared, however, he had left journalism (and New York) and moved to Hollywood to try and establish himself as a screenwriter (it didn't take), and had presumably split with Marie. (An obituary, from 1945, reports that his widow's name was Jewel, so that leaves the identity of "Toni" a mystery. I am equally clueless about who the inscribee, Virginia Hicks, might have been.) ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." Signed by Author .