This is Fay Webern's masterful chronicle of a youth spent in one of New York City's most vibrant immigrant communities during the harsh years of the Great Depression and The Second World War. Its forty-two beautifully sculpted episodes not only conjure into vivid existence a complete world, but reveal something of the bedrock of the author's inner being, in which the irreducible hardness, the 'is'-ness, of reality may be felt: the burden of survival; the 'stone in the heart'; the daily concerns, serious or frivolous, erected on it; and at the same time, always, flying above, indomitable, the muse of poetic imagination and the 'spirit of defiance. This is a joyous, magnificent achievement -- an extraordinarily truthful and moving work of art, both radically personal and universal, utterly transcending the category of memoir.
"Fay Webern was born on the Lower East Side in 1927 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and grew up living at the Lavanburg Homes, an experimental utopian housing community for low-income families. A talented child dancer, she studied from the age of seven with a member of Hanya Holm's dance company, but her professional ambitions were dashed by an accident she suffered at the age of fifteen. She later had a long career in publishing, rising to copy chief at Scientific American and then senior editor at Encyclopedia Britannica, Harper and Row, and Random House. Upon retiring in the late 1990s, she studied non-fiction writing at the Gotham Writers Workshop with essayist Tyler C.~Gore. With his encouragement, she soon became a regular reader at NYC venues such as The Knitting Factory and Arlene's Grocery until she moved to Vermont in 2002, where she still resides."
