What Zeesie Saw On Delancey Street

Zeesie feels very grown-up indeed! For on this night, her seventh birthday, Zeesie is going to her first package party with Mama and Papa. She even has a brand new dress and a dollar bill -- her birthday gift -- all for herself! The package party is grand, with great towers of wrapped surprise packages to be auctioned to raise money for other new immigrants to the community. Such wonderful smells, tastes, and sounds, and oh, so much to see... But as Zeesie soon discovers, not everything and everyplace is meant to be explored, and what she does see that night on Delancey Street leaves her with a new knowledge about giving and receiving.

A young Jewish girl living on Manhattan's Lower East Side attends her first "package party" where she learns about the traditions of generosity, courage, and community among Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s.

A young Jewish girl living on Manhattan's Lower East Side attends her first "package party" where she learns about the traditions of generosity, courage, and community among Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s.

This wonderful resource from two authors with an infectious enthusiasm for children's literature will help readers select and share quality books for and with young children. Specifically focused on infants through the third grade, Sharing the Journey contains descriptive book annotations, instructive commentary, and creative teaching activities tailored for those important years. Extensive book lists throughout will help readers build a library of quality children's literature. Books representing other cultures are included to help celebrate diversity as well as cultural connection. Genre chapters include poetry, fantasy, and realistic and historical fiction. A chapter on informational books demonstrates how young children can be introduced to, and learn to enjoy, nonfiction.

Cover the spectrum of Jewish topics: Bible, Ethics, History, Folklore, Holidays, Holocaust, and Life Cycle. For teachers in supplementary schools and day schools group workers.

Manhattan's Lower East Side stands for Jewish experience in America. With the possible exception of African-Americans and Harlem, no ethnic group has been so thoroughly understood and imagined through a particular chunk of space. Despite the fact that most American Jews have never set foot there--and many come from families that did not immigrate through New York much less reside on Hester or Delancey Street--the Lower East Side is firm in their collective memory. Whether they have been there or not, people reminisce about the Lower East Side as the place where life pulsated, bread tasted better, relationships were richer, tradition thrived, and passions flared. This was not always so. During the years now fondly recalled (1880-1930), the neighborhood was only occasionally called the Lower East Side. Though largely populated by Jews from Eastern Europe, it was not ethnically or even religiously homogenous. The tenements, grinding poverty, sweatshops, and packs of roaming children were considered the stuff of social work, not nostalgia and romance. To learn when and why this dark warren of pushcart-lined streets became an icon, Hasia Diner follows a wide trail of high and popular culture. She examines children's stories, novels, movies, museum exhibits, television shows, summer-camp reenactments, walking tours, consumer catalogues, and photos hung on deli walls far from Manhattan. Diner finds that it was after World War II when the Lower East Side was enshrined as the place through which Jews passed from European oppression to the promised land of America. The space became sacred at a time when Jews were simultaneously absorbing the enormity of the Holocaust and finding acceptance and opportunity in an increasingly liberal United States. Particularly after 1960, the Lower East Side gave often secularized and suburban Jews a biblical, yet distinctly American story about who they were and how they got here. Displaying the author's own fondness for the Lower East Side of story books, combined with a commitment to historical truth, Lower East Side Memories is an insightful account of one of our most famous neighborhoods and its power to shape identity.