Family of Strangers

Family of Strangers draws on hundreds of newspaper accounts, articles, and oral histories to provide the first comprehensive account of Washington State's Jewish residents. The first Jewish immigrants came in a small trickle during the middle of the nineteenth century, and then in larger numbers during the open-door era that stretched to 1924. They included Ashkenazim primarily from the cities, towns, and shtetls of central and eastern Europe and Sephardim from the Mediterranean Basin.

Followed by European Jews fleeing persecution by the Nazis and discrimination by the Soviet Union, they grew in number with the arrival of American Jews who were part of the great westward movement in the postwar era. Isolated from the large centers of American Jewish life, speaking different languages -- German, Yiddish, Ladino, and others -- and following different religious customs, initially these groups had little in common other than their identification as Jews.