David Schearl, Schearl family

Another novel in which I felt like I curled up in the main character's home, a slum apartment, and watched and listened to everything going on. I was there with David on the train tracks. I felt everything he felt right, to the end. Another skillful use of dialogue from the vernacular street talk of children, in New York City early 20th century.

The small white steamer, Peter Stuyvesant, that delivered the immigrants from the stench and throb of the steerage to the stench and throb of New York tenements, rolled slightly on the water beside the stone quay in the lee of the weathered barracks and the new brick buildings of Ellis island.

(spoiler alert)

Pair reading this with the Stud Lonigan Trilogy, which is about the Irish immigrant experience in Chicago. Why are the Jewish kids always the one to be beaten up by other street gangs?

1930 to 1939 The Depression Writers