Steerage

Steven Ujifusa’s “The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I” (2023) is a background story on the one hand of Czar Nicholas II’s pogroms in Russia of the late 19th – early 20th century. It reads in some respects not unlike the immigration tragedy of the Americas today. For those earlier immigrants, too, there was no turning back. Misery and death were in their wake, or conscription into the deadly conflicts of the Russian army. On the other hand, the book is an incisive story of steamship capitalism of that day, a lesser-told story. Between 1881 and 1914, more than 10 million people took flight by land and sea from Russia and other eastern European countries where conditions for survival were dire. About 25% were Jew…