Marilyn’s Comments (group member since Mar 20, 2025)

Marilyn’s comments from the Reading "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" in April group.

My partner came down with the flu, so I will do a wrap-up of the book this week. I'm also going on vacation in two weeks. I hope you all enjoyed reading this wonderful book. Aloha

Hello friends, I know some of you are messaging me with your thoughts. Right now, Denise and Jack are in this group, so thank you. I want to finish the book by the end of May because I'm leaving on a jet plane in June lol. I'll try to give a summary at the end of the weekend. Aloha

Denise wrote: "It was sad to see Johnny go downhill so fast after he found out about the last baby. Poverty and a lack of resources and just the era that the story happened in. I also kind of think about how life..."
Thank you, Denise, for bringing up the part about birth control. I remember the "Margaret Sanger" clinic. She was a social activist who started the first birth control clinic in 1916 in Brooklyn. and eventually "Planned Parenthood". But I guess Catholics didn't run to those clinics at the time that Katie got pregnant. Katie was a very conservative character. This shows why she moved so much when the neighbors got nosy. I will try to finish book four this weekend. Aloha friend

I love the part where Francie's father picks a house so she can go to a better school. It's one of the most important things he does for her. He is so young, yet even before his alcoholism sets in, his admission of not being able to do creative work, like singing, highlights how poverty and lack of education are key points that permeate the whole book.
It's really poverty that kills Johnny and many others in the book. Later in the book, another character has a similar break with tradition when his life as a workman fails.
I love that the real streets I walked on are mentioned by name. Lorimer being more high-class was a joke to me. It was just a broader avenue when I grew up. When I married, I moved to Grand Street where Francie lived, but on the corner of Bushwick Avenue, which is depicted in the book as
where the hoity toity lived. I moved there in 1967. It wasn't fancy at all.
I won't go deeply into the attempted molestation of Francie. I found the culmination of that part somewhat overdramatic, but the reality of the molesters in the neighborhood is very real. Even when the storekeeper pinched Francie's cheek in the beginning, we can tell that life was dangerous for children.
When Katie gets pregnant, life goes downhill for the Nolan family, but Betty Smith foreshadows Johnny's decline from the beginning of the book. It's very sad. Aloha for now.

I've been busy with physical therapy, but I wanted to add my two cents on something that resonated with me in chapter 37 of book one. I love the scene where the children follow the traveling entertainers and the organ grinder monkey team. I vaguely remember seeing one in the fifties in Coney Island, but they were outlawed in NYC in the late thirties. It was a poignant scene when all the poor children with their siblings took off for the whole day to follow the music. At the end of the chapter, Betty Smith mentions the sadness in the "precociousness" of the children. They were responsible for babies in buggies and wagons who they couldn't take care of properly, and they were underfed. But they followed the music like the pied piper. Powerful scene!

S. wrote: "I love Sissy, and how the sisters band together to help each other and the kids."
Yes, Sissy is a gem!

S. wrote: "I found it so disheartening to see how cold Francie's librarian was! Not my experience with librarians at all. I'm glad Francie had that vase and flowers, at least. AND of course the books."

I went to the same library as Francie, and in the fifties, the librarians were only somewhat better. In the early sixties, they hired an African American librarian. She was strict, but helped me learn the card catalog when I approached. I only asked her when I had an assignment. I still remember that she wore glasses and styled her hair in a bun. And of course, there were the books! Aloha

Hello Tree readers, I've been so busy this weekend, but I will give a summary before tomorrow. Aloha

Hi Tree Readers, I'm going to finish rereading Book three over the weekend and will be back with comments on Monday. Aloha

Hi Denise, Betty Smith puts a lot of humor in her storytelling, which is vital in a semi-autobiographical book. I like Sissy a lot too, and her story runs parallel to Katie's. Yet they are such different people, despite the family being important to both. Smith said all the people in the book were her family or people she knew in her neighborhood. Thank you for your comment. Aloha.

Hello Tree Readers. This part of the book starts with a flashback to 1900, and we learn about the History of the Rommely family, Francie's mother's German background. We digest a lot of information. Mary Rommely, with her abusive husband, comes from Austria and is illiterate, but has in her memory stories and legends from the old country. This will prove to be important in the story.
We are also introduced to the sisters, especially Sissy, who is an vital character in the book.
We learn how Katie falls for Johnny and is smart enough to take him away from Hildy. We get more than a foreshadowing of the life she will have with Johnny. We are told she will suffer because the author comments that Katie should have picked someone who loved her more than she loved him.
There is great humor in these chapters, the hatpin Hildy takes out to poke Katie and ends up scratching Johnny Nolan, and wonderful details of the Brooklyn of the time.
We are introduced to Sissy. That whole section shows how poor people at the time were quick to judge other women. Some of my thoughts are that Betty Smith draws her male characters as richly as her female ones.
Also, how newcomers to Brooklyn were not always told education was free in the States, and how important Betty Smith felt that education was the way out of poverty.
Uncle Flittman and his horse Drummond are comic relief to the tragedy of Sissy's stillbirths which sounds so unusual and almost magical or Dicksonian. but Betty Smith pulls together these threads later in the book.
The highlight of the chapters was how Mary Rommely, without education, steers her daughters to Shakespeare and the Bible, even though she herself could not read. I felt this was the highlight of these chapters and foreshadowed Francie's life. What say everyone? Aloha and happy reading.

Up to chapter 11

Denise wrote: "Hi Marilyn. I got in! Yay!"
Hi Denise, Can't wait for your first post? I will post up to book 2 up to chapter 10. Aloha

Hi Tree Readers, I'll have more comments tomorrow, but every chapter brings new revelations. Katie, the mother, comes from a German background, like the author. In every one of Betty Smith's books, the mother and daughter are at loggerheads for different reasons.
I now understand why the soldiers in WW2 wrote fan letters to Betty Smith because of how she portrays poor men trying to survive in Williamsburg and how poverty and lack of education hold back both the young women and men.
So far, poverty is a big theme in the beginning of the book. I will be more specific tomorrow. Hope you all are as fascinated as I am with the book. Aloha

Hi Tree Readers, I'll be reading another 3 chapters tonight and will have comments tomorrow. I hope to hear from all of you soon. Aloha

Chapters 1-3
Every time I reread this book, a memory tugs at me. This time, the Graham Avenue Trolley and Graham Avenue, the Ghetto Street, caught my attention. 65 years ago when I was Francie's age, the trolleys were gone, but some parts of Graham Avenue were still Jewish areas. I remember my mother buying my first bra at a store owned by an Orthodox Jew. He knew my size without measuring me, and I was so embarrassed. There were no pushcarts, and most of the stores sold to Puerto Rican customers, but stores that are now Bodegas were candy stores like the ones Francie talks about. And the top of Graham Avenue, which Francie mentions: Siegal Street, still had a notable Jewish presence. Francie walks up Manhattan Avenue, the street I lived on, but then they were projects. I went to the same library, which must have had a makeover in the fifties, and asked the librarian to recommend a book for me like Francie did. Luckily, my librarian was kind, but I was shy and respectful when I waited at her desk. There are scenes where Francie and others talk about Jewish people in ways that are anti semitic, but we see that Francie is only parroting what she is told. She has no malice. Neely calls a young Jewish boy a "white Jew" while his friends deny there is no such thing. What is a white Jew? I'm not positive, but Jewish people were not considered white at many in history. Because white was considered superior, a Jewish person who had strange customs to their Jewish and German neighbors were considered non white then. I love that Francie, maybe because she read so widely, questioned the truth of many ignorant opinions. That makes her a wonderful character.
The opening chapters are so full of people, family, vivid setting, and most importantly, Francie's love of reading on her fire escape, a vital space in a tenement dweller's life. New York summers are muggy, and places to get breezes are few, up on a roof, a stoop, but the best place was the fire escape. If you watched the movie "West Side Story," you will understand this New York detail.
One fact in the book that didn't change in the fifties was that Brooklyn people did not venture into Manhattan unless they worked there. This was true even when I was a teenager and always wanted to leave my borough. Francie mentioned she never had gone to Manhattan in the first chapters.
There is so much here to discuss, but I have written enough for now. Looking forward to your feedback and am excited to be reading my favorite book with others who love it too. Aloha

Aloha Tree Readers
I hope you are all enjoying "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" so far. I will have an update tomorrow Hawaii time. It's midnight now, and I'm still reading. Please feel free to read at your own pace. If you want to contact me on Voxer, my handle is alohaboomer or Maya Mendoza. Thank you, Jack, for your first summary. One tidbit I have is that for Brooklynites, the fire escape has always been vital to escape the summer heat, meet with friends, and, of course, read.

Aloha Tree Readers
Let's start with the first three chapters in Book One, ending with page 36 (in my edition). Let me know if you have questions about chapter 1 because I'm familiar with the old Brooklyn language, setting, and period. When everyone finishes, we will discuss. Thank you for joining my first read-along.