Sie befinden Sich nicht im Netzwerk der Universität Paderborn. Der Zugriff auf elektronische Ressourcen ist gegebenenfalls nur via VPN oder Shibboleth (DFN-AAI) möglich. mehr Informationen...
Streets, whose title points to the many streets on which Spewack and her family lived, depicts a girl's geographical and chronological experiences. The memoir begins with Spewack's 1902-1903 arrival in New York from Hungary when she was merely a toddler, and it concludes with her high school graduation. The voice of the memoir is that of an adult. The innocence of the young child and the occasional joy the child experiences in the early pages of the memoir disappear so rapidly that by the age of twelve, Spewack could proclaim, "I was...acutely conscious of the sordidness of the life about me" (66). So, why did Spewack not only survive but eventually thrive? Her survival was due at least in part to friendships, intense love for her brothers, books (behind which she "hid" the "life of [her] own in...school...and at the settlement house" [66]), and her mother's fierce determination that Spewack would graduate from high school. Her survival was also enabled by a keen sense of humor which could powerfully convey, for example, the implication of riding the subway from "uptown" back to the Lower East Side: "We [settlement house friends and Spewack] called out to each other and shouted and laughed. We didn't have to be ladies now. We were riding down -- not up!" (75)