![]() ![]() Trouble is, Dottie’s baby isn’t his–and he’s in no hurry to get married, even resists her attempts at seduction, on religious grounds. She has a fiancé, Abe, a solid, stolid type. She has a good job at an uptown insurance firm and has just been promoted to head bookkeeper. Meanwhile, Dottie dreams of escaping the Lower East Side and the shtetl mentality to which Rose was born. ![]() More importantly, she wants, above all, to have the time to devote herself to causes she believes in, such as helping European Jews escape Hitler’s menace. Rose has spent her life caring for them and her husband, Ben–worn herself out, in fact, to the point that she hoped she’d changed her last diaper. ![]() Rose has four surviving children, having lost one to polio and others in miscarriages, Dottie being her eldest. Both Rose Krasinsky and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Dottie, are pregnant, and neither planned it nor wish it. In Brown’s terrific debut novel, however, which depicts Orthodox life on New York’s Lower East Side in 1935, it’s no joke. Lower East Side tenements as they appeared in 2004 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons). ![]()
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