In My Father's Bakery: A Bronx Memoir

Rating:
Summary: A poignant and well told reminiscence of a bronx boyhood.
Review: I recently finished this wonderful book and it is sitting by my wife's bedside waiting for her to get to it. Each of the stories has a plot of sorts and they are simply told and arranged with great skill. They are basically stories about the characters that inhabited the author's youth and the Bronx bakery owned by his family. The stories concern the family and employees who worked in the bakery, the customers, suppliers and locals whom the author observed while doing his homework in the bakery's back room. Through these characters, the author has successfully made the bakery itself and the life that swirled around it into a living "character."

On the most basic level, the book will have a nostalgic appeal to New Yorkers who grew up in similar neighborhoods during the later 1930s and 1940s. To the nostalgic reader of today this book will recapture what they recall to have been a quieter and more innocent time, but, the high level of the story telling insures that other readers will appreciate the internal and external struggles that the characters lived through during times of depression and war. The book is graceful, often poignant, and good humored throughout, and for about a week it sent me off to slumberland with a satisfied smile on my face.

Rating:
Summary: An engagingly told autobiographical remembrance
Review: In My Father's Bakery: A Bronx Memoir by Marvin Korman is a relaxed, impressionable memoir of the Depression and war years, focusing on the lives of a family of individuals, their friends, and their neighbors. Korman reveals just what it was like to grow up in a Jewish family, personally discover the ups and downs of life, and a great deal more. An engagingly told autobiographical remembrance with full tribute to the hardworking souls that persevered at their jobs day in, day out, In My Father's Bakery is welcome and rewarding reading.