The Home on Gorham Street looks back to an earlier era of care for orphaned and dependent children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Within this social history and ethnography, the voices of elders once wards of the home in the 1930s and 1940s tell us in sometimes poetic, often comic, usually ironic, and always poignant words what it was really like to grow up in an orphanage. Emerging from this penetrating adventure are principles for the future of effective group care in meeting
the needs of the rapidly growing number of abused, forsaken, and orphaned children.Goldstein's ethnography demonstrates amply that children who spend years in an institution can go on to lead productive lives under certain conditions. Such conditions may never have been met in any other children's institution. That they did exist one time, however, is cause not only to rejoice but also to understand that recreating these conditions is difficult and possibly impossible.
- ISBN13 9780817307813
- Publish Date 30 January 1996
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint The University of Alabama Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 256
- Language English