A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
eorge Orwell’s birth name? Sylvia Plath’s married name?
Voltaire’s “real last name” from which he anagrammized his
pseudonym? Sure, I can toss these off: Eric Blair, Hughes,
Arouet, l. j. But if you’d thrown at me “Elizabeth Wehner’s name as
author?” I wouldn’t have known the wonderfully plain “Betty Smith.”
(Her first husband was a Smith; her second, a Jones.) The simple name
suits her tale of a precocious and optimistic young girl, Francie Nolan,
growing up in the harsh poverty of her immigrant family’s home in the
slums of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The original title They
Lived in Brooklyn was altered to the symbolic: Francie thrives amid
adversity as robustly as the tree of the title, the ailanthus tree, the Tree
of Heaven.
The novel opens when Francie is eleven. She and her brother Neely
are hauling rags and metal and rubber, earning a few coins by selling
junk. Francie earns an extra penny for not flinching when the “junkie”
pinches her cheek. It’s 1912, but it’s no nostalgic Eden in Brooklyn, and
a serious child molester appears later in the novel. Francie and Neely’s
mother, Katie Rommely, made of “thin invisible steel,” is empress of
the art of making-do without a jot of self-pity. What do you do when
the larder is nearly empty? You play the game of North Pole: you’re an
Arctic explorer waiting for more supplies to arrive. Katie is fierce—she
shoots the child molester—and fiercely committed to delayed gratification and education. Her children read a page of the Bible and a page of
Shakespeare every day; a tin can nailed to the floor holds spare coins
dedicated to the eventual purchase of land.
G
238
October
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