This is the hard-edged true story of the making of a renowned sociologist. It is even more the story of a boy hustling to survive. A single playlet in the larger drama of American transformation, this candid memoir recounts the intensely personal story of a tormented youth spent in a ghetto within a ghetto: a small remnant community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants residing in predominantly black Harlem, eking out a marginal existence. The painful details of a boy's overcoming alienation and isolation in a hostile place and in an unloving family are finely drawn. This fascinating but sad memoir is somehow astonishingly uplifting: the sense of strength, self-reliance, and a life formed from movie houses, the Apollo Theater in its heyday, the Polo Grounds, Central Park, and the streets of Harlem is a lesson in the resilience of both the individual and America.
- ISBN10 1412812550
- ISBN13 9781412812559
- Publish Date 1 June 1998 (first published 1 April 1990)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 30 March 2022
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Taylor & Francis Inc
- Imprint AldineTransaction
- Edition Large type / large print edition
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 159
- Language English