A Shtetl in Petaluma, Review of "Comrades and Chicken Ranchers" by Kenneth Kann

It's an unlikely-sounding story: Eastern European Jews, socialists for the most part, escape the poverty and the pogroms of turn-of-the-century Russia and Poland and find a new home - in Petaluma! Hollywood will never buy the film rights, but that doesn't worry oral historian Kenneth Kann, whose new book has captured the essence not only of the place and time but a process of cultural change among three generations of this vigorous Jewish community.