The Button Thief of East 14th Street

<p class=ql-align-justify><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>The Button Thief of East 14th Street: Scenes from a Life on The Lower East Side 1927-1957</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)> is Fay Webern's masterful chronicle of a youth spent in one of New York City's most vibrant immigrant communities during the harsh years of the Great Depression and The Second World War. Its forty-two beautifully sculpted episodes not only conjure into vivid existence a complete world but reveal something of the bedrock of the author's inner being in which the irreducible hardness the is-ness of reality may be felt: the burden of survival; the stone in the heart; the daily concerns serious or frivolous erected on it; and at the same time always flying above indomitable the muse of poetic imagination and the spirit of defiance.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>The Button Thief</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)> is a joyous magnificent achievement-an extraordinarily truthful and moving work of art both radically personal and universal utterly transcending the category of memoir.</span></p>