A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and a Mystery

This month my library book club read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Many of us had read the book as a girl. Smith's novel of a young girl growing up in Brooklyn in the early years of the 20th c. is based on her own experience. I had wanted to reread this book after reading When Books Went to War and learning it was one of the most popular books among WWII soldiers.

THE NOVEL
As a teenager, I felt kinship with Francie because of her love of books, her vivid imagination, and her dream of becoming a writer.

The story takes place between 1914 to 1918. Francie's grandparents were immigrants. Her father Johnny was a charming alcoholic, a singing waiter. Her mother Katie was hard-working and frugal, determined her children would get an education and achieve the American Dream.

When pregnant with Francie, Katie's mother instructed her on the importance of books in the house. She insisted that a copy of Shakespeare and the Protestant Bible be secured, and a page from each read to the child daily, along with fairy tales from the old country and stories of Kris Kringle.

"Mother, I know there are no ghosts or fairies. I would be teaching the child foolish lies."
"Yet you must teach the child that these things are."
"Why? When I, myself, do not believe?"
"Because, the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination.The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe...Then when the world becomes too ugly to live in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination."

Francie spent a summer "stitching" on a "square of goods for a penny. It was the size of a lady's handkerchief and had a design outlined on it: a sitting Newfoundland dog with his tongue lolling out. Another penny bought a small reel of red embroidery cotton and two cents went for a pair of small hoops. Francie's grandmother taught her how to work the running stitches." Smith continues, "You were supposed to stitch a hundred of so of these squares and then sew them together to make a bedspread."

Penny Square Redwork pattern of Newfoundland dog
on my Presidents Quilt

School taught Francie about class prejudice. She realized that the clean, well-dressed children were given preference. "She learned of the class system of a great Democracy."

When the students are asked to identify their ethnic background, Francie insists she is American. The teacher pushes Francie who finally, in exasperation cries out that her parents were born in Brooklyn.

"Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read!" Books opens the world to Francie. "She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood." Francie vows to read a book a day for as long as she lived.

Francie's imagination brought trouble when she spun stories; her teacher had to instruct her on the difference between a lie and a story. Francie was aware that she "did not report things truthfully, but gave them color, excitement and dramatic twists." She saw that trait in her mother and wondered if imagination "colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it" instead of trying to change things for the better.

When Francie writes stories for school accurately reflecting her life the teacher admonishes Francie. The teacher explains, "poverty, starvation, and drunkenness are ugly subjects to choose. We all admit these things exists. But one doesn't write about them." Francie asks, "What does one write about?" And she is told to delve into her imagination and find beauty. "But those stories are the truth!" Francie explains about her work.

Because Francie has pretended to live in another part of Brooklyn to attend a better school her teacher has no idea of the reality of Francie's life. The teacher accuses Francie's stories of being sordid, and after looking the word up in the dictionary Francie bristles with anger. Francie tries to write according to her teacher's wishes, but getting an A for pretty stories based on lies was repulsive to her.

Francie's father dies, leaving her pregnant mother, who worked as a janitor, the sole support of the family. The description of Katie, hugely pregnant, on her hands and knees to scrub floors disturbs me. Francie and her brother, both recent grammar school graduates, proudly work to support the family.

Katie decides that Neely will go to high school in the fall and Francie continue working to support them. Francie excels in every job but watches her hope for education die. Eventually, she takes college-level classes without credit, marveling that her grandparents could not read and here she was in college.

I enjoyed rereading this book on so many levels. Although the novel is episodic and disjointed at points, I was compelled to keep reading. Many of the characters are 'stock' types, and yet Francie and her family elicited my emotional involvement. Our book club members remarked on the disturbing racial stereotypes.

It is amazing how much the world has changed in 100 years! Automobiles, eclectic lights, bobbed hair, voting rights for women, all came in during Francie's girlhood. It is also disturbing how little the world has changed in 100 years: Immigrants struggling to adjust to their new life, class prejudice and xenophobia, the challenge of obtaining an education, the struggle between honesty and integrity and acceptance continues.

MY BOOK

My copy of the book is the seventeenth edition and has a note, "this book is complete and unabridged in contents and is manufactured in strict conformity with Government regulations for saving paper, indicating it was produced during World War II.

There is a nameplate for Norma M. Farrell and written in ink the name Norma Schantz, 711 Ditman, Brooklyn 18, NY.

Add caption

So, of course, I had to search for Norma on Ancestry.com.

First I found her on Find A Grace Index. Norma Marie Schanz was born September 4, 1905, and died January 16, 1990, in Clearwater, FL. Norma was married to George Jacob Schanz, born March 21, 1907, and died September 23, 1963. They are buried at the Long Island National Cemetery in East Farmingdale, NY. George was a veteran whose service started May 6, 1943. He served as a Technician Fifth Grade in the Army.

Norma's father was Joseph E. Farrell, born in Chicago in 1872 and died in 1943. Her mother was Mary Leu, born in Ohio in 1879 and died in 1955. Joseph's parents were William, born 1822 in Ireland and died in 1902, and Annabell Roche, born in 1821 and died in 1874. Mary Leu's parents were Gottlieb Leu and Nanette Kander.

The census records show that Norma lived with her parents on a fruit farm near Kalamazoo. She appears on the 1910 and 1920 census as a girl. A 1919 Kalamazoo Rural Directory shows James and Marie living with children Annbelle, John, William, Norma, Ermond, Majoe and Uriel. James was a farmer and truck grower living in Oshtemo, located southwest of Kalamazoo. On the 1930 census, Norma appears working as a stenographer.

On August 2, 1930, Norma married Edward C. Rynbrand of Kalamazoo. Norma was a stenographer and Edward a shop clerk. Norma divorced Edward on May 10, 1935, for reasons of extreme and repeated cruelty. Edward then married Frances Hays.

In 1940 Norma appears (under her maiden name) living at home with her parents, along with a sibling and three nieces and nephews. She was a stenographer.

Norma and George Schanz were married September 18, 1945, in Kalamazoo, MI when Norma was 40 years old.

Georg Schanz's parents were Mary (or Marie) Weigele and Jacob Schanz, married April 20, 1901, in Richmond, NY.  George was born in 1905.

The 1910 census shows the Schanz family living on Broad Street in Richmond, NY where Jacob and Marie ran a bakery. The family appears on the 1915 Richmond, NYS Census with Jacob was a baker. His son George Jacob went by the name Jacob. They also had a daughter, Katy (Katherine).

In 1930 George lived with his mother Marie at 711 Ditman Ave. George worked as a chauffeur for a beverage company. Their property value was $9000.

The question is--how did Norma and George meet? In 1940 Norma was in Kalamazoo, and in 1945 she was married to George. George was from New York City and in the armed services. It's a mystery.

I loved how this book, which Norma received before her marriage to George, ended up in Brooklyn during Norma's early marriage.

"For All Refugees, Everywhere"

Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2015 novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature. His new book is Refugees, short stories that explore the refugee experience and are informed by his own family history.

After the Communist take over of Viet Nam in 1975 Nguyen's family was part of the 3 million who fled the country; 800,000 refugees left by boat. They endured days at sea, pirate attacks, and suffered from lack of water and food. Under Communism, those who remained faced persecution and imprisonment in reeducation camps. Nguyen's family was settled in a Pennsylvania refugee camp. They eventually moving to Harrisburg, PA then relocated to San Jose, CA, where they started a Vietnamese grocery.

These stories are deeply moving. People are haunted by the past, uncomfortable in new cultures. Their very appearance makes them stand out as different.

The narrator in Black-Eyed Woman comes from a family haunted by ghosts. She finds it ironic that she has made a career as a ghost-writer. She is visited by her brother's ghost who has come because she has tried to forget the past, but she can't forget the horror of war and what happened on the blue boat that altered their lives forever. In a few pages and flashes of memories we understand the refugee experience and the cost of survival.

The Other Man is about Liem who in 1975 arrives in San Francisco to meet his sponsors, a gay couple. He dreads telling his story one more time, and has created a 'short' version. The letters between Liem and his parents project happy, idealized versions of their lives. Liem considers how he will send postcards, photos of Chinatown New Years, and talk about his friends. His parents write that the family has been re-educated and, forgiven, have donated their homes to the revolution. Neither are able to be truthful.

The teenage girl in War Years pushes her traditional parents to sell American foods in their grocery where they sell Jasmine rice and star anise, fish sauce and red chilies, rock sugar, tripe and chicken hearts. Her mother has resisted Mrs Hoa's pressure to contribute to a fund for the guerrilla army made of former South Vietnamese soldiers who are planning a revolution to resurrect the Republic of the South--Until she sees what Mrs. Hoa's life is like and understands what she has sacrificed.

Arthur's garage is filled with knock-off high-end merchandise. In The Transplant, Arthur is duped by a grifter pretending to be his liver donor.

I'd Love You to Want Me concerns aging Professor Khanh whose memory is slipping  to an alternative reality where he married his true love instead of going through the arranged marriage to the dutiful wife who now cares for him.

The Americans considers identity and the search for home from another angle. African American James Carver served in Viet Nam. His Japanese wife insists they visit his daughter Claire who lives in Vietnam. James only knowledge of the country was from forty thousand feet as he flew over on bombing missions. He can't understand why his daughter has chosen to live in a backwater village to teach. Claire can't make him understand how she never felt accepted in the States, did not fit into any pigeon-hold of race, and how she needed to make restitution for the damage he had wrecked on the country during the war.

A divorced son moves in with his elderly father in Someone Else Besides You. The son had watched his father's infidelities to his arranged marriage wife. Concerned he will turn out like his dad, he has resisted his wife's desire to have a child. The father interferes, trying to get the kids back together; They learn the wife is not only pregnant, but she had visited their homeland of Vietnam.

Mr. Ly has two families in Fatherland-- the first wife who took their children and immigrated to the United States, and the replacement wife and children all named for his first children. When his eldest daughter comes to visit from the US, the younger daughter with the same name hopes her sister will sponsor her to come to America. The father had been a capitalist, and at war's end was sent to a labor camp where confessions were extracted as part of his re-education. The truth of their history and life is revealed, impacting the family dynamics.

As a genealogist I am always aware of how I got to 'here.' I think of my grandparents and great-grandparents and eighth great-grandparents. They moved across Europe, leaving their war-torn homeland and fleeing war and religious persecution. Drawn to the promise of America, they crossed the ocean, searched for new communities that would accept them, and made my life possible. We are all descended from refugees.

I am glad to have read these stories, especially in light of  the world refugee crisis today and the current administration's push against acceptance of refugees.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Refugees
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Atlantic Press
February 2017
$25 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2639-9

"Hope is the thing with feathers":The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

I read Nicola Yoon's new YA novel in one evening. I had enjoyed her first novel, Everything, Everything; Yoon's second novel The Sun is Also a Star is even better.

First, I will admit that a story only about teenagers falling in love won't catch my interest. I'm not a hopeless romantic, and my teenage days date to the 1960s. But for those readers who love a good love story, Yoon delivers.

What I adore about The Sun is Also a Star is how Yoon combines a good love story, vivid characters with complex families and backgrounds, philosophical discussions on the nature of love, science, and human nature, and social commentary.

Daniel: "I think we are all connected, everyone on earth." Natasha:" Even the bad people?" Daniel: "Yes. But everyone has at least a little good in them...I think all the good parts of us are connected at some level....I think that's God. God is the connection of the very best parts of us." 

The Sun is Also a Star brings together, seemingly randomly, two high school seniors and depicts their one day together as they slowly reveal who they are and fall in love. Everything they do impacts other people, changing their lives as well.

Daniel is the son of South Korean immigrants who expect him to use his American opportunities to earn a high profile career and big income. At heart, Daniel is a poet. Natasha and her family are illegal aliens from Jamaica; her family is ordered to leave the country that day. Natasha holds to science and objectivity, distrusting romance and sentiment. Daniel falls for Natasha and spends the day convincing her to love him.

As we learn about the characters and their families we also learn about the realities of immigrant life, the feelings of displacement and hard cultural adjustment. A chapter on Korean American History explains the history of how South Koreans became experts in African American hair care. Daniel's brother desperately wants to be 'American' and rejects his heritage and his family in the process. Natasha's father came to America to act, and he has a remarkable ability but his thick accent precludes his advancement. His family lives in near poverty, Natasha and her nine-year-old brother sharing the living room as their bedroom.

As Daniel and Natasha progress through the stages of new love, even to their first fight and separation, Yoon shares their thoughts in lovely epigrams.

"We tell ourselves there are reasons for the things that happened, but we're just telling ourselves stories. We make them up. They don't mean anything."

"Touching him is like order and chaos, like being assembled and disassembled at the same time."

"Maybe falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself. I like who I am with her."

The lovers struggle with the impact of their families expectations and experiences of racism and class. "Who are we if not a product of our families and their histories?" wonders Natasha. Parents "can't see past their own history," and they want to protect their children by encouraging, or forcing them onto paths for their own good Daniel learns.

 The book has been on the YA bestseller book and won acclaim. For good reason.

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Sun is Also a Star
Nicola Yoon
Delacorte Press
$18.99 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-53349668-0

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

I was thrilled to win Behold the Dreamers on Goodreads Giveaways! After reading it, I am grateful to have won it. It is a beautifully written, deep, and thoughtful exploration of the oldest theme in American literature: The American Dream. What makes this treatment stand out is the jutaposition of the dreamers who hope to achieve the dream against the family who already lives the dream.

Jende and Neni have come to New York City hoping for a better life. Neni is a strong willed woman who defied her father to marry Jende. She is determined to get an education and a career. When Neni became pregnant her father had Jende imprisoned. In 2007, now together and living in Harlem, Neni is in school and Jende has landed a posh job as a chauffeur to a Lehman Brothers executive. They are full of hope for the future. All they need is to become permanent residents.

Jende's boss Clark and his wife Cindy are successful, rich, beautiful people, who have come up from the lower and middle classes. In truth Clark is a workaholic whose moral sense must be supressed as he conforms to the business ethics of Lehmans, while Cindy obsesses over fitting in, passing as one of the 1% to maintain her status.

As the two couples struggle with their personal demons, watching their dreams unravel, choices are made that will alter their lives forever.

I enjoyed this book on so many levels. Mbue is a wonderful story teller, her characters are vivid and unforgetable. The treatment of  the immigrant experience and American immigration law is relevent and revealing.

I loved how Jende and Neni were hard working idealists about America. The battle between Clark's Midwest values and the realities of Wall Street destroy him while his wife escapes into the oblivion of drugs and alcohol. Cindy and Clark's son Vince understands the spiritual death of American society, dropping out to find a life worth living. I loved the ending as Jende and Clark meet a final time, no longer boss and servant, but as men recognizing their mutual struggle to do what is best for their families.

It impressed me that Mbue, born in Cameroon and living in America for ten years, has a masterful writing style and a deep and intelligent insight into the psyche of both immigrant and American. This is her first book, and I can't wait to read more from Mbue.

I received a free book from Random House in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
Random House
$28 hard cover
ISBN:9780812998481

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Eilis is a smart girl. She wants to be a bookkeeper but the only job she can get is working Sunday mornings at the local grocery shop. She wishes she were as beautiful as her sister Rose, but feels snubbed by the 'rugby set' at the parish dances. When she realizes her older sister has arranged for her to leave their village in Ireland for better opportunities in Brooklyn she is not excited but neither does she voice her reluctance. She us a girl who is used to doing what is expected of her.

...she was going to lose this world for ever...she would never have an ordinary day again in this ordinary place...the rest of her life with be a struggle with the unfamiliar.

In Brooklyn everything is arranged for her, the room at the boarding house, the job on the floor of a fancy shop. What no one has warned her about, including her brothers who left Ireland for England, was that overwhelming homesickness also awaited her in Brooklyn.

She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything...Nothing here was part of her. it was false, empty, she thought.

She takes evening college classes to fill her mind and nights. She goes to the local dances with the other boarding house girls and meets an Italian American boy, Tony. He is a nice boy, a cheerful lad, a respectful beau. And he loves Eilis. She begins to believe she loves him when she learns that Rose has died. She arranges to go  home, planning to be away a month before returning to her new life with a promised bookkeeping job and a husband. But once home, Eilis becomes entangled and is faced with a terrible choice.

The book is quiet, Eilis is passive, the writing elegant and beautiful. In an interview Toibin said he used the memory of his own homesickness when abroad to inform Eilis. I felt her homesickness, something I know quite well. I love Toibin's writing, nothing flashy and loud, but poignant and grounded in shared, real life experiences.

Nora Webster is mentioned in the book; Nora had her own novel last year, which I reviewed here.

Brooklyn has been made into a movie! See the preview here:
https://youtu.be/iWgCwrJ5Jzc

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Brooklyn
Colm Toibin
Penguin Books
ISBN: 9780141041742