A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Francie Nolan's Williamsburg childhood, and the ailanthus in the tenement yard that will not be got rid of.
Francie Nolan grows up poor in Williamsburg before the First World War, with a mother who cleans and a father who drinks and charms. Betty Smith’s 1943 novel is about literacy as escape and about the ailanthus in the yard, the tree that grows out of cement and cannot be killed.
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Tracy Chevalier
It’s also an immigrant; it’s also scrabbling to survive. People are always trying to get rid of it: they chop it down and they pull it up, yet from the chopped-down tree springs a new tree. They never can seem to get rid of it and it grows in the courtyard of the tenements where the family lives. At the end, the family falls apart and yet still survives, just as the tree continues to grow.
Interview · March 2016
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