Bronx Primitive

Kate Simon came to America with her family as Kaila, a four-year-old escaping the privations of the Warsaw ghetto. For Kate, the New World became the neighborhood around 178th Street and Lafontaine Avenue in the Bronx - a maelstrom of immigrant cultures and religions. As she adapts to her new country and ventures from the front stoop of her tenements out into her new city, she also endures the hardships of many young girls: an autocratic father, dirty old men, and the realization of what it means to be female in a male-dominated culture. I iridescent, clear-eyed prose, Kate Simon captures this particular world without sentimentality or nostalgia, evoking a New York and a childhood that were harsh, but charged with beauty and possibility.