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Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side
“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 ).
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 ).
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 5, 2020
Bella Spewack (née Cohen) came to America from Romania as a child with her mother at the turn of the century. Against all odds Bella struggled to finish high school and fulfilled her dream of becoming a successful journalist, writer, and together with her husband, a Hollywood scriptwriter and Broadway book writer (Kiss me Kate, for one). Spewack wrote her memoir of growing dirt poor in the teaming streets and dark tenements of the Lower East Side, but never published it during her lifetime. The manuscript was found and published by the estate executor, Arthur Elias. The Streets provides a true, unvarnished picture of a girl growing up in utter poverty. She describes her family hardships, including death of her little half brother, and her struggles not only to survive but to rise above the dark, stinking hopelessness of the immigrant existence. Her language and descriptions of people and surroundings are very precise and at times humorous, as if a successful author is looking back at the plucky, stubborn girl she was then.
January 31, 2025
Those last two pages were like a punch to the gut
March 6, 2010
A wonderful memoir focusing on the American immigrant tradition from the Eastern European female perspective!
This was a reading requirement for a class I took for my masters degree - "The Immigration Experience in Literature". As a matter of fact, one of the requirements in this class was to lead a book discussion about a piece of immigration lit and this was the one that I chose because I thought it was a wonderful period piece, offering a captivating account of one woman's experiences as an immigrant in the late 19th-early 20th century. This is representative of both the feminine and the general immigration experience. As stated in Ruth Limmer’s introduction, Bella Spewack’s memoir “can also be read generically, as representative history of immigrant women who found themselves in urban America at almost any time between 1848 and 1915” (xv). Indeed, her experiences seem incredibly difficult and painful, and yet they were common to most immigrants. Extreme poverty, the risk of homelessness, begging for charity, living in dirty, rat-infested tenements, working for unfair wages for employers with unreasonable expectations, losing a baby to disease, were all hardships that, as we see in the memoirs of immigrants to the United States, were realities which most accepted as normal facts of life.
The text is structured with each chapter bearing the name of one of the five New York City streets on which Bella lived as a child. Each street has its characters, its events, and the catalyst for the move to the subsequent street. Bella’s homes are, both to the reader and to Bella herself, portrayed as dismal. There is no romanticizing of poverty, with the “poor but happy” that are a myth of our collective immigrant “history”. Poverty is portrayed as the evil it is, robbing the family of its dignity, forcing the poor to deal with charitable organizations which require its beneficiaries to demean themselves in order to receive assistance. Public education is seen as the only way out – the only path to “Americanization”, an education that seeks to offset the immigrant conditions and provide the children with information that their environs cannot supply. An example is Bella’s ironic description of the Arbor Day celebration, in a teeming slum where a tree is indeed a rarity. While the subjects studied in school do not mirror the immigrant children’s reality, it does provide a respite from the smells, chaos and intensity of the urban slum life. Despite her immaturity and instability throughout the text, Fanny Cohen, Bella’s mother, does recognize the importance of making a “lady” of her daughter by allowing her to finish high school. Here we see another constant in immigrant mentality and writings – the desire that the next generation have a better life. While not all groups or individuals saw education as the key to a better life (some felt work was the answer, for example), the desire to see one’s children achieve a greater level of “American-ness” is a recurring one among immigrants.
Throughout the text, we see Spewack’s gift for writing in a way that recounts her sorrows without ever falling into self-pity or lament. There is a great deal of irony in the text, as well as an awareness that her hardships were shared by so many. She is able to illustrate that her world is full of injustices without taking on the role of martyr or victim!
This was a reading requirement for a class I took for my masters degree - "The Immigration Experience in Literature". As a matter of fact, one of the requirements in this class was to lead a book discussion about a piece of immigration lit and this was the one that I chose because I thought it was a wonderful period piece, offering a captivating account of one woman's experiences as an immigrant in the late 19th-early 20th century. This is representative of both the feminine and the general immigration experience. As stated in Ruth Limmer’s introduction, Bella Spewack’s memoir “can also be read generically, as representative history of immigrant women who found themselves in urban America at almost any time between 1848 and 1915” (xv). Indeed, her experiences seem incredibly difficult and painful, and yet they were common to most immigrants. Extreme poverty, the risk of homelessness, begging for charity, living in dirty, rat-infested tenements, working for unfair wages for employers with unreasonable expectations, losing a baby to disease, were all hardships that, as we see in the memoirs of immigrants to the United States, were realities which most accepted as normal facts of life.
The text is structured with each chapter bearing the name of one of the five New York City streets on which Bella lived as a child. Each street has its characters, its events, and the catalyst for the move to the subsequent street. Bella’s homes are, both to the reader and to Bella herself, portrayed as dismal. There is no romanticizing of poverty, with the “poor but happy” that are a myth of our collective immigrant “history”. Poverty is portrayed as the evil it is, robbing the family of its dignity, forcing the poor to deal with charitable organizations which require its beneficiaries to demean themselves in order to receive assistance. Public education is seen as the only way out – the only path to “Americanization”, an education that seeks to offset the immigrant conditions and provide the children with information that their environs cannot supply. An example is Bella’s ironic description of the Arbor Day celebration, in a teeming slum where a tree is indeed a rarity. While the subjects studied in school do not mirror the immigrant children’s reality, it does provide a respite from the smells, chaos and intensity of the urban slum life. Despite her immaturity and instability throughout the text, Fanny Cohen, Bella’s mother, does recognize the importance of making a “lady” of her daughter by allowing her to finish high school. Here we see another constant in immigrant mentality and writings – the desire that the next generation have a better life. While not all groups or individuals saw education as the key to a better life (some felt work was the answer, for example), the desire to see one’s children achieve a greater level of “American-ness” is a recurring one among immigrants.
Throughout the text, we see Spewack’s gift for writing in a way that recounts her sorrows without ever falling into self-pity or lament. There is a great deal of irony in the text, as well as an awareness that her hardships were shared by so many. She is able to illustrate that her world is full of injustices without taking on the role of martyr or victim!
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December 2, 2020Read for research. Richly described, detailed memoir of the Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century.
March 9, 2025
Tracked down this book after I stayed with my niece in the lower east side. Enjoyed staying there and reading this book. Well written and interesting, and quite sad.
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August 7, 2013How do people overcome such crushing poverty? It's amazing and frightening.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews