Oscar's American Dream by Barry Wittenstein, illustrated by Kristen & Kevin Howdeshell

 

Oscar"s American Dream by Barry Wittenstein,

illustrated by Kristen & Kevin Howdeshell

Schwartz & Wade, 2020, 36 pages

Not long ago, I reviewed a book about a lake house that bore witness to the changing 20th century in Germany. Now, here is a book about a shop on a corner in New York City that bears witness to 100 hundred years of people's different American dreams from 1899 to 1999.

Oskar Nowicki arrived in New York City via Ellis Island from his native Poland. He has a dream and with money loaned to him by his mother, Oskar "replaced the k in his name with a c" and opened a barber shop on the corner of Front Street and Second Avenue in 1899. The barber shop was successful, but then the subway comes along, and in 1908, Oscar's dream changed when he went to work as a train conductor. 

Oscar's barber shop is replaced with Out with the Old, a successful women's clothing shop owned by Nettie and Yettie Jaffe. The Jaffe sisters dressed women from 1915s suffragettes to 1920s flappers, believing that "the good times were here to stay -" right up until the stock market crash of 1929 when "millions like Nettie and Yettie lost everything" and they were forced out of business. 

The shop on the corner of Front Street and Second Avenue becamed a soup kitchen, feeding hundreds of hungry out of work New Yorkers and their families every day. When America entered WWII in 1941, the soup kitchen morphed into a United States Army Recruitment Office and "young men lined up around the block, eager for a chance to become heroes." 

After the war, the building was boarded up until Moises Ortiz Jr. arrived in New York with money his brother in Puerto Rico lent him and the shop on Front Street and Second Avenue became Bodega Suprema, selling everything "from cigars to coffee beans, toilet paper to newspapers and foods from home..." But when television came along, Moises's bodega became Renate's TV Center, named for his baby daughter. 

Renate's TV Center was a good business until fire swept through the shop and "Moise's dreams were no más." Was that the end of the shop on the corner of Front Street and Second Avenue? No, indeed. Wittenstein continues through the 1960s and the March on Washington, and the changing demands of the 1970s and 1980s.

But in 1999, the "wheels of progress" brought a bulldozer to raze the the building. Will this really be the end of the shop that was the embodiment of so many American dreams?

Oscar's American Dream is fiction. There is a Front Street and there is a Second Avenue in NYC, but they don't intersect. No matter, because it is a story not interested in being a factual history, but in being a history about how American dreams are often manifested in the life of a single building. And in a way it tells us to look at that history from both a general point of view and a particular point of view. General, in that you could look at the history of any building anywhere that has been standing for a while and see how changing times and changing dreams have been reflected in it. It is particular because more and more old New York City buildings are being torn down and replaced with nondescript structures, devoid of any personality. Maybe that's true where you live, too. But, with those old buildings go a history of people's dreams.

I really liked the way Wittenstein seamlessly slipped from one era to the next, and using spare text provided a clear picture of what was happening both in the shop and in the world. His purpose, as he writes in his Author's Note, is to see if he could better understand the past by looking at just one building and I would say he has definitely succeeded at that. 

Complimenting the text are engaging pencil and pen digitally compiled illustrations. Readers will want to carefully explore these inviting illustrations and find all of little details that add to the story.   

Oscar's American Dream is an excellent way to introduce young readers to history, where they will discover that it "is alive. And if you stand on a corner and look carefully, you might even see it go marching by."

The NYC building I miss the most - Ralph's Candy Store on Church Avenue between Argyle and Rugby Roads - what great memories of candy, comics, chocolate egg creams, Mello-Rolls, and friends.  

This book is recommended for readers age 6+

This book was gratefully received from the author.