Jews - United States - History 

"Novelist Birmingham has compiled a voluminous, friendly collective history of ""Our Crowd""--variously known as the Jewish ""One Hundred"" or the ""gilded ghetto""--and it falls somewhere between social history and elevated tattletale. A little like Cleveland Amory, but without Amory's stylish turn of phrase. Birmingham has obviously had greater access to some families rather than others, (our in-informants say a few facts are wrong) and the Seligmans (peers and equivalents of the Rothschilds who dominated the pre-Civil War scene), the Schiffs, and to a lesser extent the more conspicuous Guggenheims, the Lewisohns, Warburgs and Lehmans dominate the chronicle. These assorted annals concentrate on how they made their money rather than spent it (although Otto Kahn's favorite number for dinner was sixty, and Adolph Lewisohn maintained thirty gardeners); indicate the solid, stolid echt German stability of these people who, economically, built a banking society of their own and, socially, formed a closed end mutual fund (particularly, until after World War II, in their exclusion of Russian Jewry). Occasional anecdotes brighten the pages--for instance Henriette Seligman who flushed a prowler out of her basement and put him out on the street with a firm ""Do not return."" The market--that of The Rothschilds to begin with even if we question if it will go that far." -- Kirkus Reviews