Anita Diamant’s novel, The Boston Girl: A Novel, captures the essence of an immigrant Jewish family. College student Ava interviews her 85 year-old grandmother Addie: “How did you become the woman you are today?”
Addie was born into an immigrant Jewish family in Boston in the early 1900’s. During her lifetime, her family experiences many changes in society, changes her parents resist. Addie’s mother, a bitter, complaining woman, sees little good in anything. Her father is mostly silent during his wife’s rages, but Addie feels the brunt of the family’s strife. They live in a cold water flat with a shared outhouse in back of the tenement.
As Addie grows into womanhood, she realizes her life is different from that of her family’s old-world views, and she strives to create an independent life. Addie’s story takes us through WWI, the depression, and ends in the 1930’s.
I found The Boston Girl enlightening with its world views seen through Jewish immigrants’ eyes. As Addie is exposed to other ways of life, she longs to become a part of the new world, but always feels the burden of her parents’ anger and frustration. Anita Diamant is also the author of The Red Tent, which is an entirely different novel than The Boston Girl, so much so that I found it difficult to believe it was the same author. But The Boston Girl has its own value in its sharing of the difficulties of adapting to an unfamiliar culture.