"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," by Betty Smith

 It is easy to grow despondent when thinking of the large number of great books I will never read. In a typical year, I read about 30 books, which is less than many of my friends read. But I am not a speed reader and often make notes of passages that I like. Of course, reading books is in addition to newspapers, magazine articles, and reports. But when I think of the number of books out there and of the fact that perhaps 200,000 books get published each year just in the U.S. it is easy to become discouraged – so many books and so little time.

 

Nevertheless, this novel is special. The poverty Betty Smith wrote of was beyond my comprehension, but there was, apparently, little complaining. And it was fascinating to realize this book, written by a woman of a time thirty years earlier, was one of the most popular stories read by American soldiers during the Second World War, one of whom was my father. Many American soldiers, I am sure, could identify with tenements like those in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and as she was writing of a time that, to them, was not that distant.

 

Perhaps this short essay (under 600 words) will entice you. 

 

Sydney

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

March 2, 2024

 

“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.”

                                                                                                A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)

                                                                                                Betty Smith (1896-1972)

 

It was the Ailanthus tree, known as the tree of heaven in its native China and which became invasive in North America, that Ms. Smith used as a symbol of hope and perseverance for her heroine Francie Nolan in this coming-of-age story, in the poverty-stricken Williamsburg section of Brooklyn during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century: “No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree that struggled to reach the sky…it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.” 

 

While the story is fictional, Ms. Smith used her own life as inspiration. On August 22, 1943 Meyer Berger wrote of the book in The New York Times: “…a stringing together of memory beads...” In an interview for the magazine This Week, Ms. Smith was quoted: “To live, to struggle, to be in love with life…is fulfillment.”

 

While the story takes place thirty years earlier, the book was published in 1943, as World War II devastated the planet. The book became immensely popular. Shortly after publication, it was released in a paperback Armed Services Edition[1]. Within two years it had sold nearly three million copies. 

 

It is Francie Nolan’s story of growing up, with her brother Neely, in (unimaginable to us) urban poverty. Williamsburg at the time was home to first-and-second generation immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Italy. As well, there were streets primarily inhabited by Jewish immigrants and African-Americans. Assimilation was just beginning, as Francie’s mother was German and her father Irish.

 

Despite the poverty that enshrouds their lives in Brooklyn, Katie’s mother Mary Rommely speaks of their reason for emigrating: “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…” She tells her daughter there are two great books, Shakespeare and the Bible. So Francie and Neely grow up, having a page from each read to them every evening.

 

Francie’s father was loving, but an alcoholic who died young. Her mother was the breadwinner, cleaning apartments. Francie was bright, a good student. At age ten, confused between truth and fancy, she recalls the best advice she ever got from a teacher: “Write the story. Tell the truth. Then you won’t get mixed up.” And she realized the answer to poverty: “Education would pull them out of the grime and dirt.”

 

The story ends with another tree, a cherished Christmas tree that had sickened, burnt and died, but from which seedlings grew: “It lived!” Francine reminisces.  “And nothing could destroy it.” 

 

 

 

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[1] In a letter to my mother on September 23, 1944, my father wrote of reading the book when at Camp Swift in Bastrop County, Texas: “I’ve almost finished it. I think it’s really good. I get quite wrapped up in it.” So did I.

Review - "The Book at War," Andrew Pettegree

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Book at War. Andrew Pettegree

February 19, 2024

 

“Books…played an essential role in maintaining civilian and troop morale.”

                                                                                                                                Andrew Pettegree (1957-)

                                                                                                                                The Book at War, 2023

 

This book will appeal to those with an interest in books and war, especially the Twentieth Century’s two world wars. Professor Pettegree, a professor of modern history at St. Andrews, mentions Carl von Clausewitz’ On War and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; he touches on Herodotus and Caesar; and he spends some time on the American Civil War. He notes that it was ten years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabinin 1852 that Lincoln allegedly asked: “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” He concludes with a mention that the war in Ukraine caused one resident “to use his personal library to block the window as blast protection.” 

 

Since the advent of the printing press, books in war time have been used in many ways: To instruct; to provide comfort to combatants and civilians (132 million copies of 1,322 titles were produced in Armed Services paperback editions during World War 2); as propaganda: Churchill, “We must add to…the power of ideas;” they have been censored and destroyed. “…in Smolensk the Germans burned down all the libraries and twenty-two schools before they abandoned the city with the loss of 646,000 books.” Less well known – at least to me – was that T.S. Eliot black-balled the publication of Animal Farm in 1944. In all, the author estimates that a total of 500 million books were destroyed during the World War 2. 

 

We read of a September 2, 1914 meeting at Wellington House in London attended by James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells and twenty other prominent authors who committed “unambiguously” to assist the war effort. And we learn that three to four million books, many “read almost to destruction” were left behind in German POW camps in 1945. The Nazis, committed to genocide of Europe’s Jews, were intent on dismantling their culture, which included the destruction of entire libraries. After the war Allied forces were ordered to eradicate ideologies that had contributed to Nazi resilience: “This was an uneasy time for occupying forces that had gone into the war celebrating books as beacons of freedom, but ended as their destroyers.” In a humorous aside, Pettegree writes: “In 1952, comics were removed from on-board bookshops of the Pacific fleet, on the grounds they were too graphic for marines and sailors.”

 

Of personal interest were books mentioned by Professor Pettegree that my father had mentioned in letters to my mother when he was serving with the 10^th Mountain Division during World War 2: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith; Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit; Anne and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon, The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams, and the poems of A.E. Housman. 

 

The Book at War is divided into six main headings: “…building a fighting nation; libraries as munitions of war; books on the home front; providing books for troops; book plunder and destruction in wartime; reconstruction of book stocks, and the war for ideological supremacy in the Cold War.” Readers will not be disappointed with this unique perspective on war and literature.