“Sometimes I think it's better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than to just be... safe. At least she knows she's living.”
I don’t really know what to write in this blog post because everything I start to write feels too constrictive. This is a book about a girl named Francie Nolan and her family, who reside in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 1900s. This is all true and yet… a summary of the plot of the book does not capture what actually makes this book great. Neither does simply talking about its broader themes of poverty and education and family. Take the following passage for example: “The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it every day. What had Granma Mary Rommely said? ‘To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.’” It’s Francie’s voice, or rather Smith’s voice, that makes this novel so incredibly compelling. It’s how Smith shares this world, which is loosely based on her own experiences, with such ease and grace that propels readers to the next line and the next line and the next. Here’s another example: “She read the words over aloud. They sounded like words that came in a can; the freshness was cooked out of them. She closed the book and put it away.”
The student that recommended the book to me told me that they first read it in high school, after immigrating to the United States with their family. When I pressed them for why specifically the book resonated with them, they said that they couldn’t really remember why but just that it had. I completely understand this sentiment–many times the impact of a book is more implicit than we realize and it’s only after reflecting that we can coax the why out. One theme that really resonated with me was education. Specifically, the importance of and inequalities in education. Education was pushed on the Nolan children as a way to break the poverty cycle but the children, particularly Francie, faced great difficulty in obtaining an education let alone a good education. I will not go over the specific details of the novel or spoil the ending in case someone here hasn’t read it, but the descriptions really resonated with me and my family’s experiences with education. I did not face any of the hardships Francie faced at the various public schools I attended before arriving at CMC, but some plot lines reminded me of stories my mother told me about her schooling in the Soviet Union before her family immigrated to Israel. Indeed, Francie reminded me a lot of my mother, whose love of reading led to her becoming a teacher and passing on her love of reading to me.
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” sparks nostalgia, the remembered pain of having to grow up and leave the comfortable world that we find in books or our parents create for us to keep reality hidden for as long as possible. It demonstrates the impracticality of love, the harshness of love, and how vital love, particularly familial love, is in our lives. It is not a book that is loud or ostentatious but instead, quietly welcomes us to a difficult world where the Nolan family lead difficult lives but remain strong and caring and, in a way, hopeful.
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