THE CHANGELINGS

by Jo Sinclair ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Closer to The Wasteland (the Harper prize novel in 1946) than Sing At My Wake, this has much of the social content and concern of the earlier book, tells a story of a street in an anonymous middlewestern city where the tight, traditional world of its Russian Jewish families is threatened by the Negroes who are moving in. Here the Zigmans, the Goldeas, the Millers, and an occasional Italian family such as the Valentis have safeguarded their identity and found their security in exclusion. But it is Judy Vincent, almost 13, her friends, Dave and Juley, who are the changelings of Juley's poem, the ""children who are never their children in the heart"" and must think and feel differently. Dave, whose brothers are offenders, refuses to be like them; Judy makes friends with a Negro girl, senses an affinity that the color of her skin cannot possibly alter; and Juley, just before his death, tries to persuade his mother to open up her house to a Negro family- and her mind to the knowledge that the cannot harm her- the only evil is her own dark inner fear.... A depressed area, and to some extent the depressing lives within it, is brightened by its vista of a wider world and recorded with intensity and eloquence. The publishers will try to bring this to a larger audience than it might otherwise reach.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1955

Categories: FICTION