Several weeks
ago, my niece, an English teacher, said she had just read A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn at the recommendation of one of her students. She was moved to
tears when I told her my late mother had once told me it was her favorite book.
I decided to read it and found a musty dusty copy in my local library.
Written by
Betty Smith, and published in 1943, it is one of those young adult classics everyone
has heard of, but today next to no one reads. It needs to be dusted off and
added back to the curriculum.
The story is
about an Irish immigrant family living in the Williamsburg neighborhood of
Brooklyn in the run-up to World War I. It
is told through the eyes of Francie Nolan, the daughter in the family, from her
childhood years through leaving for college.
Brooklyn in those years was an ethnic melting pot, quite similar to the
then boom town of Gary, Indiana where my mother was born and raised – which I’m
sure is one of the reasons she loved the novel. Open up my mother’s high school yearbook and you’ll discover a textbook
of “foreign” names.
The Nolan
family was immigrant poor, as was mostly everyone in the neighborhood. Her father
Johnny worked when he could as a server for a local banquet caterer, making
extra tips by being the fun-loving singer waiter – and often drinking those
tips away on his way home. Her mother Katie cleaned
other people’s houses for income.
Francie’s younger
brother Neeley was the “favored” child – true to the time period, all efforts
went into the son because he would one day be the breadwinner in a
family, whereas the daughter needed to be prepared to be a homemaker. The challenge, one of many, was that Francie
was the ambitious bookworm, and Neeley was, well, average at best. When the family was short on income, it was
decided that Francie would have to drop out of school “for a while.”
Despite these
hardships, Francie works her way up through the “great American melting pot,” finally
getting the opportunity to go to college by the end of the book. Not every immigrant kid from the neighborhood was
able to do so, and their stories are also an important part of the novel.
