Not all American Jews came from places like Anatevka.

That's the main lesson she learned from her 10 years of research in Baltimore and Philadelphia, London, Israel, Lithuania, Latvia, Germany and elsewhere, says Elisa New, whose family memoir, Jacob's Cane: A Jewish Family's Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore (Basic Books), will be published this month.

Some Jews came to America from places similar to the fabled town of Fiddler on the Roof fame -- from "the lost world" of Eastern European shtetls -- and worked hard to get a better life for their children.

"But other Jews [including her own family] came from a more educated background," says New, 51, who divides her time between Brookline, Mass., where she teaches English and American literature and language at Harvard, and Washington, D.C., where her husband, Larry Summers, is director of the White House's National Economic Council.

"Lots of Jews who came to America brought ideas about civilization with them that were sophisticated, and America gave them a place to apply those ideas," she says.

Many of those people came to "America after the Civil War with skills and ideas and were able to hit the ground running when they come."

The idea of the goldene medina "where all problems are put behind you is not a true story for my family and others," New says.

The author, who grew up in Washington, going to Winston Churchill High School and attending services at the Reform Washington Hebrew Congregation, was inspired to launch her literary and historical odyssey after studying an elaborately carved and decorated cane that her great-grandfather, Jacob Levy, received from his family when he returned to visit Lithuania and Latvia in 1928.

Levy had arrived in Baltimore in 1884 as a 17-year-old literate workman with mechanical skills who in short order was filing patents for his inventions and opened his own business, Levy's International Shrinking Company, that preshrunk fabric before it was made into clothing.

Interestingly, he claimed he came from Austria, instead of Lithuania.

In Baltimore in the second half of the 19th century, German speakers -- both Jewish and non-Jewish -- formed a commercial and cultural elite, and her grandfather lied about his country of origin to gain entrance into this group, to take advantage of the "privileges accruing to Germanness," she believes.

"In Baltimore, for those properly liberal, neither country nor ethnic origin outweighed the bond of the common language. Spoken by Baltimore's rising business class, German carried with it Kultur -- the common love of music, reading, and the edifying lecture," she writes.

"Nor did religious affiliation present insuperable barriers."

But, New writes, by 1903, when her grandfather began filing his patents, he had become "by life and deed a citizen of the United States of America ... [who] offered his talents to a public he trusted could use them."

Her great-great-uncle, Bernhard Baron, came to Baltimore from Brest-Litovsk in the Russian Empire. He invented a cigarette rolling machine, bought the Carreras Tobacco Company in London, became a major manufacturer of cigarettes in England and much of the world, and an extremely wealthy man.

But both Baron and Levy were about much more than just becoming wealthy; they both believed in progress and that what they were doing would help other people and lead to a better world. Both treated their workers very well.

Levy even ran for Congress on the Socialist Party ticket in 1914; Baron, by taking cigarettes, which had been a pleasure of the wealthy, and making them available to the masses, saw himself as trying to "perfect the very machinery of civilization -- using the cigarette as his tool," writes New, who attended Brandeis University as an undergraduate and Columbia University where she received a Ph.D. in English in 1988.

She has learned from her research that Baron and Levy were not unusual -- that in the 19th and 20th centuries, it had been the "character" of Jews "to pursue an ideal of civilization and to believe in modernity and progress and be in the forefront of that [struggle], to be a driving force in the pursuit of civilization. That possibility of Jews helping the world to achieve civilization was something that they believed until 1941."

In that year, the Nazis invaded Lithuania. They -- probably helped by Lithuanian volunteers -- murdered every member of her family who remained behind, with the exception of Riva (now Rifka) Levy, one of her great-grandfather's nieces, whom New found living in Israel in 2008.

In addition to being the story of a Jewish family, Jacob's Cane also delves into history of the 19th and 20th centuries, covering topics such as slavery, trade and fashion.

New never met her great-grandfather -- he died in 1939 -- but she came to respect and identify with him during her research.

"I love the fact that he was a man with an immense library," she says. "I was fascinated by the fact that I had a relative who was a Marxist who was always reading."