Publisher's Synopsis
This 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. This is a joyous, magnificent achievement -- an extraordinarily truthful and moving work of art, both radically personal and universal, utterly transcending the category of memoir.
