Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side Book

A wonderful memoir focusing on the American immigrant tradition from the Eastern European female perspective!

This was a reading requirement for a class I took for my masters degree - "The Immigration Experience in Literature". As a matter of fact, one of the requirements in this class was to lead a book discussion about a piece of immigration lit and this was the one that I chose because I thought it was a wonderful period piece, offering a captivating account of one woman's experiences as an immigrant in the late 19th-early 20th century. This is representative of both the feminine and the general immigration experience. As stated in Ruth Limmer's introduction, Bella Spewack's memoir "can also be read generically, as representative history of immigrant women who found themselves in urban America at almost any time between 1848 and 1915" (xv). Indeed, her experiences seem incredibly difficult and painful, and yet they were common to most immigrants. Extreme poverty, the risk of homelessness, begging for charity, living in dirty, rat-infested tenements, working for unfair wages for employers with unreasonable expectations, losing a baby to disease, were all hardships that, as we see in the memoirs of immigrants to the United States, were realities which most accepted as normal facts of life.

The text is structured with each chapter bearing the name of one of the five New York City streets on which Bella lived as a child. Each street has its characters, its events, and the catalyst for the move to the subsequent street. Bella's homes are, both to the reader and to Bella herself, portrayed as dismal. There is no romanticizing of poverty, with the "poor but happy" that are a myth of our collective immigrant "history". Poverty is portrayed as the evil it is, robbing the family of its dignity, forcing the poor to deal with charitable organizations which require its beneficiaries to demean themselves in order to receive assistance. Public education is seen as the only way out - the only path to "Americanization", an education that seeks to offset the immigrant conditions and provide the children with information that their environs cannot supply. An example is Bella's ironic description of the Arbor Day celebration, in a teeming slum where a tree is indeed a rarity. While the subjects studied in school do not mirror the immigrant children's reality, it does provide a respite from the smells, chaos and intensity of the urban slum life. Despite her immaturity and instability throughout the text, Fanny Cohen, Bella's mother, does recognize the importance of making a "lady" of her daughter by allowing her to finish high school. Here we see another constant in immigrant mentality and writings - the desire that the next generation have a better life. While not all groups or individuals saw education as the key to a better life (some felt work was the answer, for example), the desire to see one's children achieve a greater level of "American-ness" is a recurring one among immigrants.

Throughout the text, we see Spewack's gift for writing in a way that recounts her sorrows without ever falling into self-pity or lament. There is a great deal of irony in the text, as well as an awareness that her hardships were shared by so many. She is able to illustrate that her world is full of injustices without taking on the role of martyr or victim!