To a New World: Photos and Impressions of America in 1937

Von Jon Bernstein, Claus D. Bernet und Judy Mandelbaum

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.

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: Edition Graugans
• Erscheinungsdatum: 9. Juni 2016
• ISBN: 9783945865026

Jon Bernstein

JON BERNSTEIN is the pseudonym of a Jewish immigrant from Budapest who arrived on the shores of the New World in 1937. The present book has been assembled from his photos and journal entries.

Buchvorschau

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.