The Block and Beyond, p. 77 - 109 Summary and Analysis

This section begins with a description of how many of the features of Chester Street remembered by the author have changed, particularly recalling the local barbershop (with its wall-hung images of sex and war), and the house next door to his (where the daughter wanted to marry a non-Jew and the mother was furiously set against it). He writes of two colorful local women, one who remembers plucking chickens with the same vicious efficiency that she flirted with him, another who endured the whispered taunts and condemnation of the other Jews in the neighborhood even as she begged for the food and clothes that would sustain her. He then describes the angry intensity with which he and his friends played on the streets (see "Quotes", p. 84), games which often led him...