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Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side
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Product Description
With a sense of the telling anecdote, the young Bella describes the sights and sounds of her neighborhood, and introduces a wide array of people as her family moves annually to save rent or find a still cheaper apartment. Her mother works as a live-in domestic, then takes on sewing and eventually boarders, as well as a new and unfriendly husband. Bella's world also includes two younger brothers, one of whom needs constant nursing.
Streets includes the story of Bella's high school years-her mother was determined to make "a lady" of her daughter and would not allow her to work in a factory-and ends before she meets and marries Sam Spewack. At once street-smart and unsentimental Bella is a sturdy American hero who overcomes life's obstacles in a world that will later welcome her as a celebrated author.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #844934 in Books
- Published on: 1996-09-01
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: .1 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 180 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Spewack, a journalist and playwright, wrote this candid account of her childhood at the turn of the century in New York's teeming tenements when she was only 22, in the Twenties. Posthumously, her literary executors sought publication as a tribute to the remarkable woman who had overcome innumerable obstacles to lead an interesting and successful life. Raised by a mother who had been abandoned by two husbands and had to claw her way through the system to provide for three children, the young Bella did not have many opportunities or role models to guide her. Spewack vividly describes the poverty, the pettiness, the smells, and the cacophony that permeated tenement life. She breathes life into the cast of sympathetic characters who passed through her early years. Spewack's achievements can motivate and inspire struggling young women today. Easily read, this book is recommended for public libraries as well as for women's collections.?Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr. Lib., Philadelphia
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Successful Broadway (Kiss Me, Kate) and Hollywood (My Favorite Wife) writer Spewak began life in Transylvania in 1899, the love child of a teenage peasant and a man who disappeared before Bella was born. Three years later, she and her mother joined the flood of Eastern European Jews emigrating to New York City. In this memoir, which she wrote in her twenties but never published, Spewak recalls growing up in the slums of the Lower East Side. Through her eyes, we see the deprivation she and her mother had to endure: the abysmal housing, the unsanitary living conditions, the inadequate health care, the demeaning, exhausting work in sweatshops and wealthier homes, and the inevitable predatory employers happy to take advantage of a young single mother. Written in the stark, naturalistic prose of a born journalist, the book provides a startling, clear-eyed look at the difficult life millions endured in what sentimentalists call a simpler, happier time in America. Jack Helbig
