num_pages: 180
description: “A startling, clear-eyed” memoir of an immigrant girl’s childhood in early 20th century NYC from the journalist and Tony-winning co-author of Kiss Me Kate ( Booklist ).Born in Transylvania in 1899, Bella Spewack arrived on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side when she was three. At twenty-two, while working as a reporter with her husband in Europe, she wrote a memoir of her childhood that was never published. More than seventy years later, the publication of Streets recovers a remarkable voice and offers a vivid chronicle of a lost world.Bella, who went on to a brilliant career write for stage and screen with her husband Sam, describes the sights, sounds, and characters of urban Jewish immigrant life after the turn of the century. Witty, street-smart, and unsentimental, Bella was a genuine American heroine who displays in this memoir “a triumph of will and spirit” ( The Jewish Week ).
language: English
title: Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side
titlecomplete: Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side
genres: History, New York, Memoir, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 63
publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY