Greenhorns : stories
(Unknown)

From celebrated writer/historian Richard Slotkin, a cycle of stories that reads like David Bezmozgis mixed with Frank McCourt. A kosher butcher with gambling problems; a woman whose elegant persona conceals unspeakable horror; a Jewish Pygmalion who turns a wretched orphan into a "real American girl"; a boy who clings to his father's old-world code of honor on the mean streets of Brooklyn; the "little man who wasn't there," whose absence reflects his family's inability to deal with its memories--these tales of early 20th-century Jewish immigration blur memoir and fiction, recovering the violent circumstances, the emotional costs of uprooting that left people uncertain of their place in America and shaped the lives of their American descendants.