Return to Brooklyn's tree

Press, 29 June 1985, Page 20

Return to Brooklyn's tree

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. By Bett Smith. Pan Books, 1985. 399 pp. $7.95 (paperback). It is forty years since this book was first published; time for a generation to have missed out on reading it. It is the story of Francie Nolan, a child with a fierce will to survive in the hard world that was Brooklyn at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like the tree that forces its way to life through the cement of Brooklyn’s pavements and tenement yards, Francie Nolan probes for survival through impossible cracks and crevices in her environment. Papa Johnny Nolan is a handsome lightweight who earns a few dollars as a singing waiter and dreams of

immortality. Brooklyn is too much for him. Katie Nolan scrubs tenements. She has steely principles and is capable of the grand gesture in spite of the family’s ferocious poverty. Her children are street-wise and have learned, too young, how to survive on the scraps of life. The book is as wiry as the Nolans themselves. There is no sentimentality in the telling of this story. It is as plain as the loaf Katie Nolan makes out of stale bread, an onion, and a sprig of parsley, and as gratifying as the loaf seems to a family that knows all about hunger. The book reflects the nerve, the sinew and resilience of the Nolans. If they survive it is not because of luck, but because they make it so.—Joan Curry.