Button Thief of East 14th Street : Scenes from a L

The Button Thief of East 14th Street: Scenes from a Life on The Lower East Side 1927-1957 is Fay Webern's masterful chronicle of a youth spent in one of New York City's most vibrant immigrant communities during the harsh years of the Great Depression and The Second World War. Its forty-two beautifully sculpted episodes not only conjure into vivid existence a complete world, but reveal something of the bedrock of the author's inner being, in which the irreducible hardness, the is-ness, of reality may be felt: the burden of survival; the stone in the heart; the daily concerns, serious or frivolous, erected on it; and at the same time, always, flying above, indomitable, the muse of poetic imagination and the spirit of defiance.The Button Thief is a joyous, magnificent achievement-an extraordinarily truthful and moving work of art, both radically personal and universal, utterly transcending the category of memoir.