My Old Neighborhood Remembered is a lyrical remembrance of
neighborhood life that has vanished from the culture. Best-selling
author Avery Corman vividly recreates the vibrant, colorful neighborhood
where he grew up - in the Bronx of the 1940s and 1950s. He recalls candy
stores and bookmakers, egg creams and double feature movies, street
games like stickball and Johnny- on-the-pony, school days of a different
era, social mores that have disappeared. His was the generation of
children of the home front during World War II, and he recounts how the
war was embedded in daily life, and how children became literate through
newspaper coverage of the war, and through Dick and Jane and comic
books. He remembers in his neighborhood a deep sense of community and
shared experience.
My Old Neighborhood Remembered is a memoir that is urban history.
Avery Corman also discusses the factors that altered the Bronx, in a
decline that was particularly rapid and vast, before the area began to
rebuild. As the author of Kramer vs. Kramer, a common assumption has
been that Avery Corman was himself divorced; he was not. He was,
however, a child of divorce at a time and place when divorce was rare,
an experience woven through the narrative. My Old Neighborhood
Remembered is told with the storytelling skills that have made Avery
Corman a critically acclaimed author whose books have been published
throughout the world.
