Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing "We Want Willkie!" Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World
The author's forebears left Italy, Poland, and Russia more than a century ago and settled in Jersey City, then a flourishing industrial center and transportation hub. They found work but met prejudice: the Irish, who, with the help of a brutal police force, controlled the corrupt political machine, despised the newcomers. Many of Stapinski's relatives became criminals, and in this candid, unsentimental memoir she suggests that boss rule created a climate for the "crimes and immoral acts" they committed. As Jersey City decays, family members go to college, leave the ethnic ghetto, and no longer find felony amusing.Copyright © 2005The New Yorker