A century of change on the Lower East Side as viewed from the neighborhood fishmonger, told humorously and endearingly.
An enduring narrative of an early Jewish Lower East Side small business.
As the grandson of the founder of J. Russ Cut Rate Appetizing (the name changed to Russ & Daughters in 1935), Federman tells a remarkable story of family foresight and resiliency. A former New York City lawyer who returned to run the family’s smoked-fish and candy store at 179 East Houston Street from 1978 until 2009, when he sold it formally to his daughter and nephew, the author has collected the story of the business’s early founding from many of the old-timers still around to lend their memories. Originally from a Yiddish-speaking shtetl in Galicia, between Poland and Ukraine, Joel Russ was sponsored to come to America in 1907 by his older sister, who needed help running her busy herring stand on Hester Street. Russ opened his “appetizing” store on Orchard Street in 1914, before moving to the present location in 1923. An appetizing store is less strictly kosher than a deli; it sells a mix of dairy and meat and also nonkosher fish such as sturgeon. Federman gives fascinating details of early life among the squalid, teeming, narrow streets of the Lower East Side in the first decades of the century, chockablock with family-run shops and clogged with pushcarts. Russ did so well he was able to move his increasing family out to Brooklyn, until the Depression forced them back to the old neighborhood. Not exactly a feminist, Russ recognized that changing the name was a good marketing ploy, and his pretty, grown daughters, Hattie, Ida and Anne, had helped him grow his business and prosper. Including precious pictures and recipes, this work offers a savory wealth of social history.
A century of change on the Lower East Side as viewed from the neighborhood fishmonger, told humorously and endearingly.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4294-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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.
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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