NONFICTION - Jan. 3, 1993

AT HOME WITH GOD: Believing Jews and Their Children photographs by Arnold Eagle, essay by Arthur Hertzberg (Aperture: $29.95; 60 pp.) . New York’s Lower East Side was once home to tens of thousands of refugees from the ghettos of Europe, and though most Jews eventually left, a remnant remained, impervious to the lures of the melting pot. It is these people whom Arnold Eagle lovingly photographed half a century ago. A righteous if dwindling group, their faces worn by work or transfixed by prayer, they were recorded for the Federal Arts Project of the WPA by Eagle, himself an immigrant, who among other things served as cameraman for documentarian Robert Flaherty (who made “Nanook of the North”). Now collected in book form for the first time, these photographs capture not only the essence of a lost era but also the spirit of the Lower East Side’s energetic street urchins who would never know the world their parents fled.