Eternal People

Eternal People tells the story of Joseph Abrams, a Ukrainian Jew who finds his way to America at the end of the nineteenth-century. During a break from his studies in Russia, he returns to his shtetl in the Ukraine to find it is the target of a Cossack raid. The village is destroyed by the Cossack attack and Joseph's family murdered, but he manages to escape and make his way by river and train to Germany.

Eventually, Joseph emigrates from Europe to America, where he lands a job at the Jewish Daily Forward under its famous editor Abraham Cahan, who had been a member of the idealistic Am Olam ("eternal people") movement in his youth. Eventually he sends Joseph to Wisconsin as a correspondent to report on the last existing Am Olam commune in Gays Mills. In Wisconsin, Joseph is reunited with his uncle and joins the movement, eventually becoming secretary to the leader of the commune, Edward Liberty.

Things begin to heat up for Joseph, however, when he falls in love with Liberty's daughter, and yet he finds himself torn by desire for another woman. At the same time, the commune is threatened by the followers of a travelling missionary named Jacob Kleinschmidt, known as "the Moses of Menomonee", who preaches a message of hate which eventually leads to a showdown with the Jewish idealists that results in a terrible and destructive fire. As the novel boils toward a climax, Joseph is forced to make some difficult choices, choices which nevertheless bring him more fully into his own adulthood.