A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
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Mary Frances "Francie" Nolan is the protagonist. The novel begins when Francie is 11 years old. The rest of the novel tells of Francie's life until she goes to college at 17. Francie grows up in Brooklyn in the early twentieth century; her family is in constant poverty throughout most of the novel. Francie shares a great admiration for her father, Johnny Nolan, and wishes for an improved relationship with her mother, hardworking Katie Nolan, recognizing similar traits in her mother and herself that she believes are a barrier to true understanding. The story of Francie traces her individual desires, affections, and hostilities while growing up in an aggressive, individualistic, romantic, and ethnic family and neighborhood; more universally it represents the hopes of immigrants in the early twentieth century to rise above poverty through their children, whom they hope will receive "education" and take their place among true Americans. Francie is symbolized by the "Tree of Heaven" that flourishes under the most unlikely urban circumstances. Some argue that the novels wild success is a result of the memoir style that allows us to see her thoughts and story from such an intimate perspective.[3]
Katie's sister, Sissy, is a sassy, free-spirited woman who has recently married for the third time. Katie learns this from gossipy insurance agent Mr. Barker when he comes by to collect the Nolans' weekly premium. Scandalized and embarrassed, Katie cuts off her relationship with Sissy, which makes the children, who love their unconventional aunt, unhappy. Francie is also worried that the building's landlord has cut too many branches off the tree in the tenement's courtyard, which Francie and her father call the Tree of Heaven, and that it may die. But when she points this out to Johnny, he explains the cutting back is necessary and the tree will grow again.
Meanwhile, Katie moves the family into a smaller, cheaper apartment on the top floor, angering her husband who thinks she is being stingy. In fact, Katie is pregnant and worried how they will support another child. Sissy also becomes pregnant, and she and Katie reconcile shortly before Christmas. The families celebrate a happy, poignant Christmas together, with the children bringing home a discarded tree, and later that night, Katie tells Johnny she is pregnant. She suggests that Francie drop out of school to work. Since Johnny understands how much being in school means to his daughter, he feels desperate to find a job. Despite the fact that it's snowing hard, Johnny goes out determined to find work but fails to return.
Production took place between May 1 and August 2, 1944.[2] Filmed on the 20th Century Fox lot, a full stage was taken up with a four-story replica of a tenement house. Described as "the most elaborate and, mechanically speaking, costly set to be used", it included elevators that enabled the camera to pan up and down the flights of stairs in some scenes.[2] The tree of the film's title has been identified as an ailanthus glandulosa. Despite the heat generated by the Klieg lights, the tree survived the filming and was re-planted elsewhere on the studio lot.[5]
etty Smith was five years older than her creation, Francie Nolan, who was born in 1901. Francie was the tree that grew in Brooklyn, the one that blossomed out of the pavements, whose strength was not recognized because the breed was so common. ''It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.'' ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,'' published in 1943, was an immediate best seller, and since then has become for its devoted readers a treasured rite of passage. A friend told me it was where she first learned at 12 about sex. Another reader was dismayed to realize that her mother had purloined incidents from Francie's childhood and made them her own, telling her daughter tales from the book as if she had lived them herself. The novelist Helen Schulman would read the book again and again, never finishing, each time starting from the beginning so that for her the book never ended.
Francie is the tree, and so is the book itself. It is, tested by time, one of the most cherished of American novels, recording in its powerful fashion the first years of this century in a breeding place of American genius, Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Greenpoint. In the novel's period these neighborhoods were mostly populated by a poverty-level mix of the two great waves of immigrants, the Irish and the Germans of the mid-19th century and the East European Jews and Italians who followed. In another novel, ''Maggie-Now,'' Smith names the whole neighborhood: ''There were so many races; so many creeds and sects all huddled together in an area not more than a mile square. The people called each other names: Mick, Heinie, Guinea, Hunky, Polack, Wop, Sheeny, Squarehead, Bohunk, Chick and Greaseball. They called the few Indians, who they believed were really Gypsies, niggers.''
Francie is second-generation American. Her father, Johnny Nolan, has an Irish background, while that of her mother, Katie Rommely, is Austrian. Yet the streets, the food, the jobs, the morals, loose and strict (a mother and her illegitimate child are stoned), the apartments are common memories. And the veracity of the tale was remarked on by reviewers right away: it is in Smith's sharp memory for detail -- for the size and weight of tin cans, for the differences in butcher shops, for the shoes of the aged. Today, Williamsburg is a mostly Hispanic and Italian neighborhood. The tenements have been replaced with housing developments, but its main thoroughfares, if you look above the storefronts, are much the same as they were for Francie. The public and parochial schools, the churches, the library, the synagogues (some of them converted to other uses) are there still. A local library has a banner proclaiming Brooklyn's finest writers: Walt Whitman, Maurice Sendak, Marianne Moore, Richard Wright and Betty Smith. Siegel Street, where Smith tells us ''Jewtown'' began, now has an alternate name -- Via San Vicente Pallotti -- and nearby Graham Avenue (Smith described it as Ghetto Street, filled with pushcarts) is also known as Via Vespucci. Life, if not swell, is better there now -- neighboring Bedford Stuyvesant or Bushwick might tell another tale, one closer to that of Smith's novel.
''Brooklyn,'' Francie tells her brother at the end of the novel. ''It's a magic city and it isn't real. . . . It's like -- yes -- a dream. . . . But it's like a dream of being poor and fighting.'' The civilization of Smith's Williamsburg exists in very few living memories -- it will be soon a century away. In that stretch of Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side, you still find Francie's streets and tenements. And when even these isolated signposts are gone, the spirit of the book, the lives and struggles it celebrates, will be with us, reminding us of who we were and who we still are.
Parents need to know that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant literary classic that tells the story of Francie Nolan as she grows up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, from 1902 to 1919. The novel brings to life the world in which Francie lives, yet portrays experiences that kids of any era can relate to -- navigating sibling relationships, making new friends, and discovering first love. It also deals with more serious subjects, such as Francie's father's alcoholism, the death of a loved one, an attempted molestation, and premarital sex causing a ruined reputation. Yet, these issues are seen through the eyes of an innocent young girl and presented in an emotionally authentic way.
Francie Nolan is a smart, astute, imaginative girl who loves reading. She lives in the slums of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, where her mother, Katie, works as a cleaning lady and her father, Johnny, holds unsteady jobs due to his alcoholism. Francie spends much of her day with her younger brother, Neeley, or reading books. She loves school and learning, and fears that her family may not be able to afford to continue sending her to school.The novel follows Francie from age 11 until she's a young woman with a job. As she grows up, Francie and her family struggle to make ends meet and often go to bed hungry. Yet, she loves her family, especially her often-singing father and her aunts, who have their own sordid lives, and experiences first love.
When the novel opens, Francie is eleven years old. It is 1912, and the Nolan family lives in an apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In the courtyard is a tree, called the Tree of Heaven, which always grows, regardless of whether or not it is watered. It even grows in cement, but only in the poorest neighborhoods.
I certainly knew, by the time I turned 13 in 1950, that there were so-called "dirty books" out there. I had sneaked a peek at a popular English novel my mother was reading (one character's breasts were described as "ample" and "melon-shaped"), and there was a gritty street-gang book about Brooklyn that made the rounds among my peers, a book in which certain page numbers had become iconic, though I doubt if any of us read the book from start to finish for plot.
Aside from the pleasure of giggling with my friends over the racy passages, neither book interested me much. Restoration England was too busy and over-populated for my unformed taste, and Brooklyn street gangs were far removed from my adolescent concerns.
And it was real. I read of the teenage girls forced from school by the necessity of earning a living, of their hasty hallway embraces with loutish boys, the early pregnancies that condemned them to bad marriages and a repeat of the stifled lives of their mothers. I read of the cruelty: the shouts of "Whore!" directed at the young unmarried girl who dared to take her baby for a walk on Francie's street. The brutality: the lurking pedophile who grabs 13-year-old Francie in a dark hallway; and maternal passion: her mother, Katie, with a gun behind her apron, who shoots him and saves her daughter. 781b155fdc