Reviews About Hollywood Park: A Novel (Paperback)

Its a review about this product

Hollywood Park has nothing to do with Hollywood. It's was a lower-middle class, mostly Jewish, neighborhood in Chicago. The year is 1934, the depth of the great depression. The big story that year is the birth of the Dionne quintuplets to a farm family in Canada. That's what the women of Hollywood park talk about when they gather in the park.
Two Jewish families, connected by marriage, are struggling to make ends meet. Richard Sherman, who made $100 a month before being laid off from his job by the depression is happy to find a sales job with a base pay of $30. His wife, Dorothy has just given birth to their second child. His immigrant father ekes out a living as a tailor, and his mother has developed severe complications of diabetes.
Dorothy's brother David is a cop, her other brother, Julius is a schizophrenic who has been committed to a state institution, and her sister Simone is married to an auto mechanic. Joe Mostowitz, the auto mechanic is the only relatively prosperous person in the two families, but Simone wants more. Much more. She leaves Joe and finds herself an Englishman who is a dead ringer for Leslie Howard.
This is a time when anti-Semitism is more the norm than the exception among gentiles of all classes. Hitler has come to power in Europe and the Nazis are trying to spread their poison everywhere they can. The German-American Bund is organizing and holding rallies-one large one soon to be held in Chicago. David and other Jewish cops have banded together with some of the tougher elements in the Jewish community and are planning to teach the Bundists a lesson.
Hollywood Park is an unsentimental portrayal of a community at a time when nothing could be taken for granted. There was no such thing as security. Ordinary people lived on the edge of destitution and any small misfortune such as an illness or a robbery could turn people's lives upside-down. Nowadays we have unemployment insurance, disability, Social Security, Medicaid and other social programs to cushion us from disaster. As frayed as our safety net has become, it is infinitely better than what there was then. Hollywood Park is a well-crafted journey to the not-so-distant past.