Inspired by hints about a distant cousin in her own family who was pulled into Murder, Inc., novelist Florence Reiss Kraut has written a book imagining what effects violent crime syndicates in Brooklyn might’ve had on one poor Jewish immigrant family in the first half of the twentieth century. Her novel follows the individual hopes, disappointments, challenges, and successes of two adults and two children from 1914 to 1942. Moments of foreshadowing alert the reader that gangs might play some intimate part in the plot — and they do. When, pages from the end, a young man named Morty writes to tell his Italian love everything that has happened to him, he might as well be describing this book: “Even to him it sounded melodramatic … like a movie he has seen before, where the good guys struggled, were in danger, and finally won the day.”
Kraut manages to generate movement and suspense by telling the story from multiple third-person perspectives. Drawing on her thorough research, she paints a realistic portrait of wider tenement life, with details about the physical environs and various cultural and religious expectations and prejudices. When the novel opens, young Golda is walking off the ship that has arrived in New York City. She’s holding Morty, the newborn baby her younger sister died delivering two days before. That loss has also dashed any dreams Golda might have had about an independent future for herself in America. Ben Feinstein, her sister’s husband, has been expecting to meet his pregnant wife at the waterfront. When the shock of the news immobilizes him, Golda steps forward to do what she thinks is right: she becomes the boy’s mother and Ben’s new wife. Over time, her grim resolve softens to love — but sometimes she recedes into herself, as when her second son contracts the Spanish flu and dies. While Golda feels that she has perhaps turned a corner when their daughter, Sylvia, is born, she never fully relaxes.
Not many doors are open for young men or women, and all the local businesses pay protection money and avoid eye contact with the gangs. With Ben’s machine shop and Golda’s embroidery piecework, they scrimp and save to help Morty go to college for an engineering degree. Just when it looks like his studies will lift him out of this cycle of poverty, the Depression hits. Morty drops everything when his father asks for help, having borrowed money he cannot repay. He is angry with his father and upset that he has to leave his Italian Catholic girlfriend. Although he has promised her he will never join a gang, he goes down that road, doing enforcement work for a criminal group he abhors.
Informed by her sensibilities as a social worker, Kraut fleshes out the weaknesses and strengths of even minor characters. Families come together despite prejudices; struggling adults reach out to a neighborhood rabbi, to whom they continue to turn for advice through the years. Kraut’s straightforward, empathetic prose carries readers into a dramatic yet little-discussed moment in history.
Sharon Elswit, author of The Jewish Story Finder and a school librarian for forty years in NYC, now resides in San Francisco, where she shares tales aloud in a local JCC preschool and volunteers with 826 Valencia to help students write their own stories and poems.
