The Block and Beyond, p. 109 - 131 Summary and Analysis

At the beginning of this section, the author describes his fear of the family's coal cellar. He always felt as if there was always someone there waiting to take him by surprise. The cellar, he then writes, opened into the bricked back yard, into which came, every day, singers and musicians, begging for pennies which women wrapped in newspaper and tossed down to them (see "Quotes", p. 112).

The remainder of this section is taken up with a detailed memoir of the Soloveys, a family of Russian Jews that ran the drugstore on the corner who, the author comments, had lived in a number of other countries (including France and Russia). Their reasons for settling in Brownsville were both a mystery and the subject of much gossip (see "Quotes", p. 118). Mr. Solovey...