Ira Berkow
Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977. First edition. 0385067232 xiv/532 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 8.75", is bound in gray cloth, with stamped dark red lettering to spine. Book is in fine condition. Binding is firm. Pages are clean and bright. Work is illustrated with plate sections with numerous b&w photographs. Dust jacket, with price of $14.50 on front flap, displays shelfwear, with very light soiling and minor loss to the upper outside corner of rear flap/cover (with loss of letters of two words). Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"Maxwell Street is an open-air market on Chicago's West Side, the center of a ghetto about a mile square, where thousands of Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms and persecutions in Eastern Europe settled and first set up business in America between 1880 and 1924.
This engrossing, lively and richly illustrated chronicle recreates the color, the diversity and personalities of Maxwell Street both through the author's recollections of his own childhood experience and the actual stories of many for whom Maxwell Street was the first taste of America.
The myth of an American Eden was a far cry from its reality: overcrowding and poor sanitation, sweatshops and poverty. But Maxwell Street held out more hope than most of the immigrants had ever known. At last they had a chance climb up in the world - or at least a dream that their children would fare better..."