Talks & Entertainment

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Red Tent and Day After Night comes The Boston Girl, a novel about family ties and values, friendship and feminism, told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early 20^th century.

The book opens in 1985, when Addie Baum’s 22-year-old granddaughter asks her to talk about what made her the woman she became. Eighty-five-year-old Addie begins in 1915, when she first started to think about what she wanted from life. Her ambitions—to finish high school and go to college, to find true love, to escape the confines of her immigrant family—are completely foreign to her parents, who have no way of understanding their American-born daughter.

Addie talks about growing up in a one-room tenement apartment in Boston’s North End with her parents and two sisters, the library group at a neighborhood settlement house where she first found her voice, her experiences in the workplace, and the ins and outs of her love life—at least as much as a grandmother would tell a granddaughter.

Diamant is the author of six nonfiction guides to contemporary Jewish life and is the founder of Mayyim Hayyim. In conversation with Gayle Wald, Professor of English and American Studies at The George Washington University. Book signing to follow.

*Check out the related Not Your Bubbe’s Sisterhood event, The Red Tent: Revisited, on January 15th.