The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood - Hardcover

Rosen, Louis

3.97

37 ratings by Goodreads

9781566631907: The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566631904 ISBN 13: 9781566631907

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 1998

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A powerful and moving story of the racial transformation of an American neighborhood, told in memoir and oral narrative. It deserves to become a classic....This text needs to be understood and performed at least as regularly as Thornton Wilder's Our Town. —Sandy Primm, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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About the Author:

Louis Rosen composes and writes for the theatre. His work includes Book of the Night and A Child's Garden. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

In the 1960s, Chicago's South Side changed from a predominantly Jewish to a mainly black neighborhood. Having grown up there, Rosen experienced this white flight and decided to conduct a series of interviews with former neighbors and friends, asking them how fear had spread so rapidly and why liberal people appeared to have become bigots. The author is a composer for the theater, and he draws on this career to format the interviews into a type of play, featuring 15 composite characters from both the black and the Jewish communities. Especially interesting are stories of how the first synagogue got started and why it faltered during the racial changes in the neighborhood and had to be relocated. The Jewish residents passionately describe their feelings of betrayal and hurt from the synagogue's loss. Also fascinating are reactions from the black community, past and present, who felt a mixture of confusion, rejection and anger when their white neighbors claimed to be moving because they wanted "better schools." After these admissions, however, the book suffers from repetition, and the 15 characters are not distinguished enough from one another. Each time Rosen identifies a factor for the change, such as whites' suspicion of increased crime from black neighbors, each character comments on the issue without always adding something meaningful to the debate. Although the author's intentions are noble, his method is questionable and, ultimately, unsatisfying.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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