Pete Hamill's concern in Snow in August, his 1997 account of Michael Devlin's boyhood passage in 1947 Brooklyn, is how to retain one's sense of honor and identity while connecting with a wider world and a more comprehensive moral code. The young Michael, whose father Tommy died at the Battle of the Bulge, struggles to help his mother, Kate, create a happier life for them and to overcome the limitations, both moral and material, of his Brooklyn neighborhood.

He achieves his goals through the examples set by his brave, feisty mother, and with the help of his parish priest, Father Heaney, whose experience as a chaplain in Europe has given him a wider sense of human tragedy and compassion. Rabbi Judah Hirsch, who introduces the boy not only to a more transcendent moral code and ethic of compassion, but also to a wider world of language, literature, and...