In a new book of poems, former St. Louisan Merle Fischlowitz celebrates the positive results of the American immigrant experience.

“From Dirt Paths to Golden Streets: Poems of the Immigrant Experience” (AuthorHouse Books, $11.49) tells the personal stories of immigrants to the United States, from the 19th century to the early 21st century. This wave includes the huge immigration to America of millions of Jews from Eastern Europe, who fled Czarist Russia or anti-Semitism in Poland, hoping to start new lives in the “Goldena Medina,” the Golden Land.

The poems in the collection – looking at immigrants from a variety of national origins and cultures, including Africa, Asia, Mexico, Europe and the Middle East – illustrate not only the reasons for immigration to America, but also the “challenges and benefits of becoming American.” The “huddled masses” of European Jews who flocked to these shores from the 1880s through the 1920s, were to learn quickly that the streets of the teeming, impoverished Lower East Side of New York were not “paved with gold,” and that anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant xenophobia were among the harsh realities they had to face as they began new lives in America.

In the poem “Blood and Gold,” Fischlowitz writes of a Jewish immigrant from a shtetl in Russia, whose experience is a far cry from the romanticized version we get in “Fiddler on the Roof.” He writes:

The path was muddy from spring rain, and the blood hardly showed as it ran down the gully from the shul past his house. He knew each year someone would be struck. Either at Passover or Easter local folk would have recreational revenge for the thought that his ancestors, so long ago had killed their Son of God.

Now it was his son who lay in pain at home on a straw bed. Eli, Eli (My God, My God!), he thought, how many more years must I wait and hope for deliverance, for peace to come to this small town?

No more waiting! He resolved instead to wrap up his few things, his family, his life and memories, and go to the new land, the “Goldena Medina,” where his wife could light candlesticks in peace, where his children need not fear a stranger on the street. After Pesach they wrapped up all their precious things, gave away the extra food to those in need, swept clean the house, now empty of hopes and dreams and tears.

Walking first, then a wagon to the train; a train to the port, then a stinking, rocking ship. A working peddler in New York crowds; from a fourth-floor, three-room home, he sought to pave his own golden streets.

The poem encapsulates the chaos and drama of the missions of East European Jews who fled the pogroms and numbing poverty of Czarist Russia and came to a major American metropolis where backbreaking work as peddlers or in sweat-shops were their only initial options. The sons, daughters and grandchildren of this immigrant Jewish generation of course would become the great novelists, lawyers, bankers, physicians and scientists of the following generations, achieving unparalleled success in a land that proved to be a golden opportunity despite not having streets paved with gold.

Fischlowitz wrote the poems in this collection from 1962 to 2009. Included are poems that reflect stories of Holocaust and survival, including “Soup” and “Bonds,” based on true stories of his wife Teresa’s life as a young survivor of the Nazi death camp Bergen-Belsen.

Fischlowitz, with his elegantly written and often moving poems, makes for timely reading in today’s America, where once again anti-immigrant prejudice and xenophobia have taken hold in places like Arizona. Fischlowitz makes a compelling case for warmly welcoming the cultural enrichment, which our country, “A Nation of Immigrants,” enjoys and from which it benefits greatly.

“From Dirt Paths to Golden Streets: Poems of the Immigrant Experience” is available on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com in softcover and electronic editions.