My Own Ground

by Hugh Nissenson

Set in the year 1912, My Own Ground is the dramatic portrayal of the spiritual and sexual awakening of Jake Brody, an orphaned fifteen-year-old immigrant on New York's Lower East Side. It is also the story of the love of Hannele Isaacs, the rabbi's daughter, for the Jewish pimp Schlifka, who ruthlessly makes her one of his girls. In the struggle to save Hannele, Jacob comes of age abruptly, discovering violence, perversity, mysticism, sexuality, and death in the bitter reality of life in a turn-of-the-century American ghetto.

Genres: Fiction

180 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1976

Reviews

[Nenia Campbell]

MY OWN GROUND is the story of a fifteen year old orphaned Russian Jewish boy named Jake living in New York in the 1910s. He befriends a local pimp, who asks him to help him find the young woman he's essentially groomed into being an SWer through captivity and abuse. Hannele is the local rabbi's daughter but now he considers her his girlfriend with benefits. Jake agrees and sells her out for $10, which is the beginning of the end of this tragic, awful story.

With vintage pulps, I generally take them with a grain of salt, but this one was a deal-breaker for me for multiple reasons: icky sex scenes with minors, multiple uses of slurs for no apparent reason, cannibalism of an infant (a woman gives birth to a baby and decides to chew off and eat its fingers), and the sexual torture and abuse of a very young woman that ends up culminating in her suicide. I actually hate that this was branded as a "love" story and that the cover looks so much like a romance novel: Hannele does not "love" her pimp, as the back cover claims. She is a victim of her own freeze and fawn survival instinct.

It looks like it's actually pretty valuable, so if you find it, you could sell it to collectors. Saul Bellow is actually advertised in the back of this book as a sort if "if you like this, then read this" type advertisement. But there's a reason, I think, that Saul Bellow is still in print and this author isn't. I won't be recommending this one.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this many, many years ago. Well-written (very) depressing story of early 20th century lower east side life of Jewish immigrants. They speak Yiddish, Russian, Ukranian, Polish, maybe some English - some very religious, some have given up belief - and some become prostitutes and some become pimps, while others work in the clothing industry. Despite the tragedies, there are some happy times and memories in their lives.

[Steph · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understood this book until the end; then, I got lost. Hate when that happens. Set in the early 1900's on the Lower East Side of NYC, it is the story of Jake Brody, Hannele Isaacs and Schlifka, a pimp.