A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I picked up Betty Smith’s American masterpiece, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), to read on my family’s trip to New York City last month. It is an American classic that I had somehow not yet read. Later, I discovered it was my maternal grandmother’s favorite book, which made it even more dear to me. The daughter and mother of a teacher, and a teacher herself, I can see why my grandmother would have championed Smith’s novel. It was a marvelous companion read for a trip to New York, but it was also a moving novel about a family’s generational struggle with poverty. Suffice to say, this is a beautiful novel that blooms with hope and life.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the story of one girl’s coming of age in the 19teens. Set, as the title suggests, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the first two decades of the twentieth century, this rich novel focuses on the story of Francie Nolan. It is also, however, the story of her parents and their love, her aunts and grandmother, her neighborhood at large. Ultimately this moving coming-of-age novel explores the American promise that poor American kids, the grandkids of immigrants perhaps, might realize and the magic of that promise.
Smith’s description of family and the true-to-life flaws in all Francie’s forebears are both wise and moving. Francie is the first-born child of Katie and Johnny Nolan, and she is born when her parents are both very young and very in love. New mother Katie soon learns, well before she hits twenty, that the world is harder than she had imagined it to be. Upon Francie’s birth, her mother’s youthful naivety and joy gives way to sternness as she determines she must harden in order that her family might survive.
Like her neighbors in early twentieth-century Brooklyn, Francie’s life is not gentle. Her family’s financial struggles lead to days and weeks when Katie, Francie, and her brother, Neeley assuage their hunger by playing games that they are explorers awaiting a coming shipment of food. Her father, while a beautiful man with a gorgeous singing voice, falls into alcoholism and does little to reliably assist with the family’s financial circumstance. But, Johnny, Francie’s Papa, provides the love and warmth in Francie’s young life that Katie in her hardworking determination may lack. His grand ideas are tragically misinformed and often comic, but his love is real. Likewise, Katie’s resolve that her family will survive provides Francie and Neeley with a stable home. Together, Katie and Johnny create a world of love and stability for Francie and her brother, even if it is one set amidst severe poverty.
Katie and Johnny are the children of German/Austrian and Irish immigrants respectively and while both can read, neither’s education surpassed grade school. Even Katie’s eldest sister, Sissy, remains illiterate because Katie’s mother, Mary Rommelle, did not understand when her eldest was school-aged that school in this new country was available to all, even to poor, immigrants like them. Sissy walks that liminal space between Old World and New, and seems to exist throughout the novel beyond some of both world’s convention; she proves a fascinating character throughout the novel. Illiterate herself, Mary watches and learns in her new home, and by the time her granddaughter Francie comes along, she has determined that education is the key to her success. Thus, as Francie is but hours old, she instructs her daughter, Katie to “read from some good book” every day (81). Mary also relays her second observation and encourages her daughter, Katie, to start saving in secret to buy land in this country. Education and land ownership, Mary has surmised, are the two tenants of success. Thus, secret savings and a culture of letters come to punctuate Francie’s childhood home.
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, then follows Francie and Neeley as they move out of childhood and through school, as they find their first jobs, discover their individual talents, wrestle with grief, and suffer their early heartaches. As it does so, Smith’s novel proves a powerful ode to the melting pot culture of Brooklyn, with Italian, German, and Irish immigrant families living alongside its Jewish ones. Just as the classic New York Reuben sandwich blends Jewish rye bread (often referred to in Smith’s novel) with Irish immigrant’s corned beef and German immigrant’s sauerkraut, so too A Tree Grows in Brooklyn demonstrates how young Francie’s childhood is touched by all these ethnic backgrounds. Through Francie’s artist eye, Smith paints a portrait of early twentieth-century Brooklyn that is both real and lovely.
Beyond Francie’s family and her neighborhood, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, is her own coming-of-age story. Francie recognizes at a young age, with help from a wonderful teacher, her aptitude for written word. Thus, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, is a sort of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, as Francie endeavors to write and to maneuver the landmines of stories, lies, and truth. She is a sensitive child who notices and responds to things outside her childhood experience; she sees her mother’s resolve, her father’s illness, her neighbor’s paradoxes, and her own path forward.
Ultimately, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn becomes an homage to the power of the American public education system, as Francie’s story illustrates its success and power to lift families out of generational poverty. What’s more, Smith’s prose bring early 20th-century Brooklyn to life for the reader and allow 21st-century readers to envision our American predecessors’ experiences, struggles, and successes a century later. Perhaps too, it might encourage some of us to take stalk of the magic of public education and the incredible privileges 21st-century American life entails, as we celebrate and mourn the successes and sadness of Francie’s young life.
Bibliography:
Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Harper Perennial: 2018.
A Few Great Passages:
“She had once started copying the book in a two-cent notebook. She wanted to own a book so badly that she had thought the copying would do it. But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked” (23-24).
“As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed” (24).
“The Nolans just couldn’t get enough of life. They lived their own lives up to the hilt but that wasn’t enough. They had to fill in on the lives of all the people they made contact with” (50).
“Now she wished she could have had the baby secretly and gone away somewhere and when it was over come back and tell him that everything was fine. She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free from it. She had had the pain. Dear God! Wasn’t that enough? Why did he have to suffer? He wasn’t put together for suffering but she was. She had borne the child but two hours ago. She was so weak that she couldn’t life her head an inch from the pillow, yet it was she who comforted him and told him not to worry, that she would take care of him” (77).
“In the old country, a man is given to the past. Here he belongs to the future. In this land, he may be what he will, if he has the good heart and the way of working honestly at the right things” (80).
“The secret lies in the reading and writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret” (81).
“Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It’s growing out of sour earth. And it’s strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way” (93).
“A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb” (145).
Teacher’s great advice: “In the future, when something comes up. You tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story” (197).
“Truth and fancy were so mixed up in her mind – as they are in the mind of every lonely child – that she didn’t know which was which. But Teacher made these two things clear to her. From that time on, she wrote little stories about things she saw and felt and did. In time, she got so that she was able to speak the truth with but a slight and instinctive coloring of the facts” (197).
“‘It’s come at last,’ she thought, ‘the time when you can long stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn’t enough food in the house you pretended that you weren’t hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter’s night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn’t be cold. You’d kill anyone who tried to harm them [ . . . ] Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief you’d give your life to spare them’” (461).
