A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)

What a wonderful holiday treat full of human tenacity, striving for something better. This book was on the employee favorites shelf at the audio book store. I had heard the title, so I looked it up in my blog and found that I had answered a reference question about it and it was in the list of books read by the women's group in Lorna Landvik's Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons. I understand that there is a revival in the popularity of this book, as it is being read by book clubs and in high schools. Well deserved.

This is mostly Francie Nolan's story - we see her growing up in Brooklyn from being 10 in 1912 to  being 17 with plenty of back stories of her family and other folks in the neighborhood. Her grandparents were immigrants and illiterate, but understood the power of an education. Their oldest daughter never learned to read, as they were not aware that schools were available for free. The other two daughters were sent to grade school. When Francie was born, her mother Katie asked her mother what to do about raising a child, and her mother answered to read one page from the Bible to the child every day, and one page from Shakespeare. When Francie's younger brother Neely reluctantly went to high school, he had heard Julius Caesar so many times, that it was a breeze for him. Francie read lots of books from the library, even if the librarian never looked up at her. I guess librarians weren't always service oriented. She educated herself, found herself a better school, helped the family by gathering junk and reselling it, and taking a job, when she would rather have gone to high school. It was interesting to watch her slowly leave the family fold and start socializing. Her mother Katie is an amazing character, as is her father Johnny - a singer with too much of a taste for alcohol, but very fairly treated.

The book is so rich with details of the social, economic, educational, political life of Brooklyn in the early 1900's. Obviously this comes from personal experience, as the author was born just five years before her heroine, and from the short biography I read, has intertwined her own life with Francie's. I know there is something special about Brooklyn - my cousin's daughter is a recent immigrant and lives in Astoria - another close knit Brooklyn community north of Williamsburg depicted in this book. I had friends from Brooklyn as I grew up, and a lot of Latvian events happened in Brooklyn in my early childhood, before people started dispersing further into the suburbs. I was confirmed in Brooklyn at the church the Latvians rented for years from the Swedes.

The stories were touching, so much the story of all immigrants to the U.S.  On Christmas Eve I read to my guests the story of Francie and Neely trying for one of the throw away Christmas trees. It would be great to continue this tradition of finding a great passage about Christmas, from books I have been reading, to read at Christmas time.