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.

The Gardener by Sarah Stewart, pictures by David Small

Behind many of those nondescript smaller apartment buildings in NYC that are now fast disappearing is a real surprise. The two back ground floor apartments have really nice sized garden out their back door. A friend of mine has her office in one of those buildings on the Upper East Side, and this weekend, I spent some time going to garden centers in Connecticut and helping her pick out some new plants for her backyard garden.

This isn't my friend's building, but it is where
Louise Fitzhugh wrote Harriet the Spy in one of those back apartments with a garden

When I got home, I pulled out my copy of The Gardener by Sarah Stewart and reread it with a great deal of pleasure. The story unfolds in a series of letters written by young Lydia Grace Finch, beginning in August 1935, when the depression was still impacting so many people in the world, including her family. Lydia Grace is leaving the country and going to live temporarily with her Uncle Jim in the city, and the first letter is addressed to him, in which she tells him three things about herself: 1- she knows a lot about gardening but not baking; 2- she would like to learn to bake, but is there any place to plant seeds?; 3- she likes to be called Lydia Grace. Packed in her suitcase, along with her clothes, are envelopes full of seeds, including marigold, cosmos, and my personal favorite zinnia. Uncle Jim is a baker, lives in an apartment over the bakery, and, Lydia Grace soon discovers, he never smiles.

In letters to her parents and her grandmother, Lydia Grace writes about everything that is going on with her in the city. In the bakery, she meets Emma and Ed Beech, Uncle Jim's friends who also work for him. Emma teaches Lydia Grace to knead bread and in exchange, she teaches Emma the Latin names of flowers. As the spring of 1936 approaches, Lydia Grace begins planting in cracked teacups, tubs, and boxes growing the seeds she brought with her and any that she is sent from home. Soon, she is growing flowers, lettuce, radishes, and onions in window boxes and on the fire escape, transforming their nondescript building into a bright, colorful, flourishing vertical garden.

But it is in the secret place (the unused roof) that Lydia Grace discovers where she really shows her gardening skills, creating a place of beauty in the midst of the city. She plants and tends her rooftop garden in secret, finally surprising Uncle Jim on the Fourth of July. But can she get to Uncle Jim to finally smile?

Maybe. A few days after the July 4th surprise, Uncle Jim has one of his own when he closes the bakery for half a day and surprises Lydia Grace with a beautiful cake covered in icing flowers. Lydia Grace is certain that cake is worth at least 1,000 smiles. What do you think?

The Gardener always makes me so happy whenever I read it. An epistolary story told in short letters written by Lydia Grace, but with enough information to know what was included in the responses she received. What makes this an especially wonderful picture book, besides its feel good story, is the way the illustrations track the story so well even as they add dimension to it. Small's watercolors increase in color as Lydia Grace's plantings grow and bloom. But look closely at each illustration for little details that add to the story, like the little gray cat in every city picture, the first dollar Uncle Jim made framed under the picture of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the envelopes full of seeds floating out of Lydia Grace's suitcase, and the changing look on faces of everyone as the flowers bloom, and the same scowl on Uncle Jim's face, no matter what is happening. No wonder David Small won the 1998 Caldecott Award. Lydia Grace spent one year in the city and really made a difference in the lives of Uncle Jim, Emma and Ed, and their customers and neighbors. What an inspiring story for young readers to enjoy!

This book is recommend for everyone😊
This book was purchased for my personal library