From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Shutting Out the Sky: Life in the Tenements of New York, 1880-1924 |
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| Author: | Deborah Hopkinson |
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| Publisher: | Orchard |
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Acclaimed author Hopkinson recounts the lives of five immigrants to New York’s Lower East Side through oral histories and engaging narrative. We hear Romanian-born Marcus Ravage’s disappointment when his aunt pushes him outside to peddle chocolates on the street. And about the pickle cart lady who stored her pickles in a rat-infested basement. We read Rose Cohen’s terrifying account of living through the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and of Pauline Newman’s struggles to learn English. But through it all, each one of these kids keeps working, keeps hoping, to achieve their own American dream.
Photographs and text document the experiences of five individuals who came to live in the Lower East Side of New York City as children or young adults from Belarus, Italy, Lithuania, and Romania at the turn of the twentieth century.
