Lower East Side Librarian

I don't know whether to identify this book as a memoir or autobiography. By the title, you'd think it was coming of age in college story, and it's definitely not that. Kathleen Norris writes mostly about her early, post-virgin 20s working at the Academy of American Poets under the direction of Betty Kray. Kray is definitely a subject worth reading and writing about, but I have to admit I was a little annoyed throughout the book that it didn't really deliver what I expected. I should probably get over that.

I just spent 400 pages in the mind of the mother of a teenage mass murderer, and I'm here to tell you that is not the nicest place to be. Mama Eva and sociopath Kevin's story is told in the form of letters from Eva to her husband/baby daddy Franklin. (Don't you love the name Franklin, btw? Why is it so much more appealing than Frank or Francis?) The basic premise is that Kevin, born to a mother who has a hard time bonding with him, is pretty much a psycho from birth, but somehow while this is apparent to Eva, Franklin can't or won't see it, which leads to some strife in their marriage. At points that stress was so hard to take because it seemed so unjust to me that I might have put the book down if I weren't reading it at a friend's recommendation.

Rivington Street starts out in pogrom ridden Russia and follows one family to the early twentieth century Lower East Side, with its pushcarts and Yiddish socialism. It is to some extent a tale of two sisters, one a garment factory union organizer and the other an aspiring clothing designer, a boss. The other strong women characters are the daughter of a selfish and sexist rabbi, a gentile suffragist, and Hannah, the old world mother of the two sisters, Sarah and Ruby Levy. I've read it a bunch of times, and it never disappoints me. I love entering the world of my grandfather's Lower East Side and the early struggles of the women's labor and suffrage movements.

In my review of Welfare Brat I remarked how impressive it is when people can remember so many details of their childhood. Scully, unfortunately, doesn't have quite the mastery that Childers does, but she reports that her sister has no memory of their childhood whatsoever, so I guess she's not doing too badly. The quality is a little uneven; some of the short, poetic chapters (64 of them in a 219 page book) are far more compelling than others.