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The Button Thief of East 14th Street

SCENES FROM A LIFE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE 1927-1957

A schmaltzy but affecting memoir of a mostly vanished world.

The debut author, who has a long history in publishing as an editor, shares her stories about coming-of-age on the Lower East Side.

Webern’s minutely detailed memoir of growing up Jewish in downtown Manhattan from the 1930s through the early ’50s excellently evokes an era of pushcarts and projects, of hard times and harsh realities. Although the author doesn’t romanticize her memories, she drenches her anecdotes in affection. Even when her nearest and dearest are behaving their worst (as they often are), Webern writes with an eye for forgiveness—or at least understanding—and not judgment; that’s not to say she’s a pushover, but much of what she says comes with an Old World–style shrug. At one point, she thought nothing of gaming Eleanor Roosevelt’s free milk line: “We each got on line twice,” she writes of herself and her siblings. “Once with our hats on and once with our hats off.” Later, when she returned a dropped wallet to its proper owner, her mother screamed, “How do you know it was his? You think he’d tell you if it wasn’t his?” The younger Webern is, the better her stories are, and there’s a disarming naïveté in the way she talks about her mother’s various scams or how she earned her own “button thief” moniker. Every once in a while, she catches readers up short with the sheer, unaffected beauty of her observations. When her grandmother died, for example, she noticed that her mother’s once-lovely singing voice had become hoarse: “she has lost her voice crying for her dead mother.” However, there’s a perilously thin line between remembering and merely going on and on. Consider one saga, which begins innocuously enough with “My mother had a flair for plucking chickens.” After almost 15 pages of chicken filth, blood, and decapitations, readers will have had more than enough. The author’s seeming lack of an inner censor as a narrator blesses her with a hugely distinctive voice; on the other hand, a stronger editor might’ve helped. Still, readers who luxuriated in the 1987 Woody Allen movie Radio Days may find the 300 pages here to be not enough, as it shares that movie’s unique sense of time and place, of quarrelsome but beloved family.

A schmaltzy but affecting memoir of a mostly vanished world.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-944697-11-2

Page Count: 330

Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2016

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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