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WORK TITLE: Bess and Frima
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1941
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1941, New York, NY; divorced.
EDUCATION:New York University, B.A., M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Formerly worked as developmental and copy editor for publishers in New York, NY, including New York University Press. City College of San Francisco, instructor in English as a second language, 1976-2012.
AVOCATIONS:Singing in an ensemble, dancing, reading and books, gardening, baking and cooking, music, “making things with my hands.”
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles and memoirs to periodicals, including Jewish Currents and San Francisco Chronicle.
SIDELIGHTS
Alice Rosenthal grew up in the Bronx, New York but moved to San Francisco i the 1970s. Rosenthal decided to write for herself following her retirement as a copy editor and English instructor. “It really is a kick and a new lease on life, and I never made a better decision than to quit teaching while I was still healthy and energetic and do this instead,” Rosenthal told Steve Almond for an interview for the Nervous Breakdown website, adding: “It’s also a distinction to be one of the world’s latest bloomers.” Rosenthal initially found publication in periodicals via memoir pieces, including a food memoir and a memoir about the Bronx in the 1940s. Rosenthal has written extensively about the 1940s and 1950s.
Take the D Train
Rosenthal self-published her first novel, Take the D Train: A Novel of New York in the 1950s, which focuses on two women, the married Frima and her sister-in-law Beth. The trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for spying is a major backdrop in the novel, which was inspired partially by Rosenthal’s parents, who, unbeknownst to her friends, were card carrying communists in the 1950s. “We called ourselves progressives—adults and kids alike—not Reds, or Leftists, and never communists—the ideology that dare not speak its name,” Rosenthal noted in her interview with Almond for the Nervous Breakdown website.
Rosenthal also commented on what it was like growing up as a progressive during the Red Scare era of the 1950s an 1960s. She told Almond for the Nervous Breakdown website interview that a major “tension” stemmed “from leading double lives” an having to think about keeping “secrets other kids didn’t even think about for fear of getting people you knew in trouble.” Rosenthal also pointed out in the interview that her mother once lost her job for refusing to testify against another teacher at a state board. Commenting on the book in the interview article, Nervous Breakdown contributor Almond said Rosenthal did “an amazing job of capturing the texture of America, and NYC, during the Fifties, especially for women like Frima and Beth, Jewish women with some education.”
Bess and Frima
In her novel Bess and Frima Rosenthal once again draws from her own past growing up in the Bronx. The novel is a prequel to Take the D Train and was described by a Kirkus Reviews contributor as a story about “a pair of best friends … [who long] for love and a larger life.” The novel finds the two friends at age nineteen who share a Jewish background in the Bronx. Commenting on setting the novel during the time of her own youth in the Bronx, Rosenthal told Lilith website contributor Yona Zeldis McDonough: “I was born and raised in the same northwest Bronx neighborhood Bess and Frima lived in bordered by Van Courtlandt Park. Frima’s first child, Lena, would have been my age. The neighborhood did not begin to change demographically or physically until the late 1950s, so we shared the same apartment houses, streets, subways, schools, libraries, shops, and park—our back yard.”
In the novel, Bess and Frima both get summer jobs in 1940 in the Catskills near Monticello, New York for the tourist season. Frima works at her mother’s resort while Bess works at a nearby hotel. Although both are thinking about romance in addition to making money, the friends are very different in their outlook on love. Frima is much more conservative than her friend. Reflecting the times they live in, Frima is looking for boy next door who can provide her with a safe life. Frima ends up falling in love with Jack, Bess’s older brother, who also works for Frima’s mother over the summer.
Bess is much more rebellious and adventuresome. She begins calling herself Beth and and falls for an Italian American named Vinny, who almost instantly garner’s the dislike of Bess’s brother Jack. Nevertheless, before the end of the summer Beth has made plans to move from home and live with Vinny. It turns out that Vinny is not acceptable to anyone in Beth’s family, which frowns on the relationship with the former Catholic and left-wing labor leader who comes from San Francisco.
Told in the alternating viewpoints of Frima and Bess/Beth, the novel follows the two friends as they face challenges and heartbreak with the onset of World War II on through the 1940s. Bess eventually discovers that the charming Jack is a narcissist. Meanwhile, Vinny gets killed during the war, leading Beth to eventually marrying Eduaro. “Vinny is a strong man; just not the appropriate, long-time partner for Bess/Beth, so I killed him off during the war so that she is free to meet Eduardo, whom I do consider a strong male character and a fitting partner for her,” Rosenthal told Lilith website contributor McDonough. In review of Bess and Frima, a What Is That Book About website contributor remarked: “It was a refreshing contrast seeing these women as they were through the influences of their time and the challenges they faced.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2018, review of Bess and Frima.
ONLINE
Alice Rosenthal website, https://aliceruthrosenthal.com (October 19, 2018).
Lilith, https://www.lilith.org/ (August 21, 2018), Yona Zeldis McDonough, author interview.
Nervous Breakdown, http://thenervousbreakdown.com/ (February 19, 2103), Steve Almond, author interview.
She Writes Press website, https://shewritespress.com/ (October 10, 2018), author profile.
What Is That Book About, https://www.whatisthatbookabout.com/ (October 20, 2018), review of Bess and Frima.
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I'm a transplant to San Francisco from NYC many years ago and have aged in place. I am a retired developmental and copy editor for NYU Press and several large NY publishers. I retired as an English instructor from City College of San Francisco in 2012 to finally begin writing creatively for myself, and hopefully a few people who would be my audience. After a fearful and tentative start, I sent out a food memoir piece to the "SF Chronicle," and they published it. I also published another memoir, about the Bronx in the 1940s in "Jewish Currents." I discovered that I was fascinated with the ambiance of the 1940s and 1950s, the eras of my childhood, and I felt, as a child of the Left--who has had plenty of time to reflect--that I had something to say, if only to those who lived in that atmosphere. I was surprised and delighted that my first novel, which I self-published,and promoted virtually not at all, was appreciated by a small but quite diversified audience who recommended it by word of mouth. When a nice lady visiting from Austin told me that she picked it up from her daughter-in-law's coffee table and swiped it so she could finish it on the plane back to Texas, I figured it was time to start another novel. When I’m not writing, I love to sing in an ensemble, dance, when I get a chance, read, garden, and bake. I love good music—all kinds—and good books, of course. Also a good refreshing argument—the dinner table kind.
Contact
e: aliceruthrosenthal@gmail.com
https://www.alicerosenthal.com/aboutcontact/
Alice Rosenthal was born and raised in 1941 in the same Bronx neighborhood as her protagonists, though a generation later. After receiving her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from NYU, she married, divorced, and settled in the Village-Chelsea area of Manhattan, where she maintained her lifestyle by copyediting for academic presses. In 1976, she moved to San Francisco and began a new worklife teaching ESL at City College of San Francisco. She loves reading, gardening, baking, cooking, making things with her hands, and shmoozing with her friends and family. She is the author of the novel Take the D Train, as well as articles published in the San Francisco Chronicle and Jewish Currents magazine.
Rosenthal, Alice: BESS AND FRIMA
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rosenthal, Alice BESS AND FRIMA She Writes Press (Adult Fiction) $16.95 8, 21 ISBN: 978-1-63152-439-4
A pair of best friends yearns for love and a larger life.
Two young women: one blonde, one brunette; one conventional, one rebellious. Both Jewish; both employed in the Catskills for the summer tourist season. Both 19. Rosenthal's (Take the D Train, 2012) new novel is set in 1940 and concerns a pair of Bronx-raised best friends. Frima spends the summer working at her mother's resort; Bess works at another hotel not far away. Frima falls in love with Bess' handsome brother, Jack, also employed by her mother that summer. Bess strays a bit afield: She catches the eye of Vinny, an Italian labor organizer. Her brother disapproves, but by the end of the summer, Bess has made some radical plans--to move away from home and, even more shocking, move in with Vinny. In alternating chapters, the novel tells the story from both girls' points of view. That structure doesn't quite work: It feels a little too on- the-one-hand-and-on-the-other, especially since the characters are set up to be opposites. Worse is the air of sentimentality that pervades the book, overwhelming brief attempts at humor. Rosenthal's prose is adequate and her subject matter not uninteresting, but the story feels utterly conventional. This terrain is already well-traversed. Her characters never come fully to life as themselves--only as two-dimensional foils for each other. The dialogue doesn't convince; nor do the characters' various motivations. We're told that Bess, for example, longs to leave home because her parents make her miserable. But we're never shown why or how they do so. Unconvincing in these smaller details, the novel remains unconvincing as a whole.
Sentimentality and a lack of original material prevent this novel from coming to life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rosenthal, Alice: BESS AND FRIMA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. Book Review Index
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August 21, 2018 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
A Female Friendship From the Catskills to the Wider World
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bess and frimaWhen Bess and Frima―both 19, best friends, and from the same Jewish background in the Bronx―get summer jobs in upstate hotels near Monticello, NY, in June 1940, they each have dreams of love, but love means something different to each of them. Frima seeks safety and finds it with Bess’s brother Jack. Rebellious Bess renames herself Beth and plunges into a new life with Vinny, an Italian American, former Catholic, left-wing labor leader from San Francisco. Her actions are totally unacceptable to her parents―which is fine with Beth, who is eager to reinvent herself outside the tight and suffocating bonds of family.
As Alice Rosenthal’s novel of friendship, Bess and Frima, unfolds, the menace of world war is growing, and Beth and Frima must grow up fast. Balancing love, ambition, religion, family, and politics, each young woman faces challenges she never imagined in her girlhood. Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough talks to author Alice Rosenthal about the personal history she mined to write this tender story.
YZM: This novel has a strong sense of place—or places—and both the Bronx and the Catskills are lovingly evoked. Are these places that figured strongly in your own life?
AR: Very much so. I was born and raised in the same northwest Bronx neighborhood Bess and Frima lived in bordered by Van Courtlandt Park. Frima’s first child, Lena, would have been my age. The neighborhood did not begin to change demographically or physically until the late 1950s, so we shared the same apartment houses, streets, subways, schools, libraries, shops, and park—our back yard.
My parents were not kosher and they were not observant in any way, so the Borscht circuit culture was not especially attractive or necessary to them. I suspect that with all their tolerance, they had mixed feelings about it—rather like Hannah Eisner. We spent a few summer vacations in Catskill towns—Saugerties, Phoenicia, Woodstock, Pine Hill, and I’d guess that a lot of the vacationers were Jewish but secular, just like my parents’ friends who were with us. I wasn’t aware of any notable Jewish quality to them. But, then, most of the people I knew were New York Jews, from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. I remember bacon on the menu in the dining rooms, like home, which made me quite happy. I did spend one summer with my sister and my grandmother at an Ellenville kosher hotel. I recall that the place was quite pretty, a big white main house, well-kept lawns, walking trails, full of wildflowers, pines, poison ivy, berry patches.
I drew on this hotel in describing The Alpine Song; I also spent summer months at a farm/boarding house owned by some elderly cousins, where my father and his brothers and sister had spent their summers. It still retained a cow and calf, chickens, an old plow horse, but it was fast becoming a modest resort. Its evolution was very akin to Eisner’s, Frima’s family farm.
YZM: Bess and Frima are so very different from one another. Is this a clue to female friendships in general?
AR: I was interested in what makes for strong sisterhood. Both Bess and Frima are based physically on young women I remember admiring when I was a child. They stood out as attractive in complementary ways. People said the same thing about my older sister and me. There is another parallel: my sister and I also had far different talents and personalities. Our problem was, sad to say, that not until middle age were we of much use to each other. So, I wanted to portray a positive, nurturing sisterhood.
Since I doubted this relationship could be born in the same nuclear family, I thought two young women who were close neighbors and fast friends would better serve as my fictional protagonists. Bess and Frima yearn for and achieve this lasting connection, both because of their similarities and their differences and, because they are not blood sisters. They share a lot: intelligence, creative talent, age, and culture. Less obvious is a loneliness they share from the absence in their lives of a caring, guiding father, and this influences them both to enter precipitous relations with men in that prewar summer. I see Bess and Frima as alter egos, both in their similarities and because their contrasting physical and emotional features complement and strengthen each other. Their creative talents are too different to cause envy or jealousy. Instead they are free to encourage each other. Bess’s impulsiveness is tempered by Frima’s reserve. Because one respects and admires the other’s strengths, they can be separate, yet close—nourished by their differences.
YZM: The women in this novel seem stronger, more directed and more enduring than the men—care to comment?
AR: A very interesting comment that leads me to view my characters through a different lens, but I also question it as a blanket description. Vinny is a strong man; just not the appropriate, long-time partner for Bess/Beth, so I killed him off during the war so that she is free to meet Eduardo, whom I do consider a strong male character and a fitting partner for her. It’s true that Lou (Hannah’s first husband) died when Frima was a child, leaving the widowed Hannah to be a strong, loving, and guiding person in Frima’s life, as well as a model of a highly competent business woman, but Lou had been deeply, if more quietly, involved with his daughter, and his influence is evident in her love of the farm that is his bequest to her. The ubiquitous Moe Greenberg does not have the same “fire in the belly” of his wife, Judith, who gives her life for women’s right to choose. But both he and Leon (Hannah’s second husband) are the bedrock on which this Catskill vacation culture is built. The only two significant men that I deliberately drew as weak are Jack and his father, Sam. Jack is miles ahead of Sam in charm, intelligence, and wit, but both suffer from a destructive narcissism. There are a couple of male hotel guests that are creeps, but nothing unusual there—we’ve all met those.
YZM: In talking about Vinny, one of the characters says, “But more that he’s not Jewish, and he’s a red to boot. Now tell me, when has Russia ever been anything but trouble for the Jews?” Do you think this reflects a common attitude felt by Jews of the period?
AR: You know what they say: Put two Jews at a table and you have an argument –political, more often as not. People in Jack’s Bronx Jewish neighborhood overwhelmingly identified as Democrats—it was the norm. But there were radical factions, right and left that were more vocal and energized as the war in Europe loomed. It would certainly not be unusual for the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to feel that Russia was an enemy of the Jews. Many of these newcomers were survivors of pogroms or other indignities at the hands of the Russians, and would be suspect of any Russians, including the Soviets. My own grandfather had joined the Bolsheviks in Russia before he came here. But as a settled citizen of his adopted country, he had very little use for the Russian government and population, socialist or not. Jack’s attitude was probably widespread. It was a particularly contentious issue, especially since the Communist Party in NYC, with a large Jewish component that was vocally pro-Soviet, believed that Stalin and his armies were the main bulwark against the Nazis and fascists in this period before America entered the war.
YZM:How does your novel Take the D Train take a different angle on the lives of Bess and Frima?
AR: My previously published novel Take the D Train depicts the lives of Bess and Frima as they mature. It brings them into the 1950s. A pivotal background event for both women is the Rosenberg trial and execution, an issue of great concern and contention for Jews of all persuasions. Their reactions to these events catalyze significant change and growth in their relationships and aspirations. Bess and Frima can be considered a prequel to Take the D Train, although it works well as a stand-alone novel too.
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An Interview with Alice Rosenthal, author of Take the D Train
By Steve Almond
February 19, 2013
Fiction Interviews
9780986010903Alice Rosenthal grew up in the Bronx, in the 1950s, with parents who were (unbeknownst to many of their colleagues, and some friends) card-carrying Communists. I know this because Alice’s older sister, Barbara, is my mother.
When I discovered that Alice was writing a novel, loosely based on her own childhood, I was eager to read it. I’ve long been fascinated by the extremes of American paranoia. What I had not expected when I picked up Take the D Train was how piercingly it would explore the complexity of the Fifties, especially for women with independent minds and inconvenient political views.
The novel focuses on the cautious, married Frima and her more impulsive sister-in-law Beth. The trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage provides a harrowing backdrop to much of the action, which is conveyed in prose that is thrilling both for its restraint and precision.
I was curious to know more about how Alice produced such a riveting novel, after years of writing.
You do an amazing job of capturing the texture of America, and NYC, during the Fifties, especially for women like Frima and Beth, Jewish women with some education. How much of it was inspired by real-life events?
“Ethel Rosenberg couldn’t be a spy. I went to school with her and she was the sweetest girl.” I remember this comment vividly. A Bronx Jewish housewife told me this as she was at the stove preparing dinner, dressed in the ubiquitous flowered housecoat. Days later I noticed this same woman step into the sunshine in a slinky grey suit and high heels, ignoring the wolf whistles of a group of teenage boys. Revelation! A woman in her early thirties could still be attractive—could even have mystery about her. She was the prototype for Frima.
Where I see Beth, I also see my Aunt Madeline, who actually worked in the office of the National Maritime Union, like Beth. Madeline met her husband there. I have an early memory of this young couple taking my sister and me to a concert. The proceeds were for war orphans, you needed kids to get in, so at four I was already enjoying of the fun and creativity of the Old Left. Leftist talent of the Forties also produced my favorite record as a child, Herman Ermine in Rabbit Town (a musical fable in which two rabbits defeat racism), narrated by Hollywood tough-guy and heartthrob John Garfield.
Did you feel the kind of excitement as a young women about Manhattan that Frima did in the novel?
Yes, but it was different. Frima loves the diversity, the freedom and anonymity downtown offers, but for her there was no social stigma to living in the Bronx. For me there was, and I wanted out.
By the Sixties, if you were a single, educated young adult, living in the Bronx marked you as locationally undesirable and unhip. The only acceptable roost within city limits was an apartment in Manhattan, far from parental eyes. Manhattan beckoned so powerfully that you gladly abandoned your family’s comfortable apartment to crowd in with roommates in some roach haven downtown. You hoped to land a rent-controlled pad on a desirable street, but almost anything was better than the Bronx. Forget all the glamorous jobs and cultural attractions of Manhattan; the real issue was finding a fulfilling partner, and for this purpose the Bronx was a dead end. Frima could settle down with the boy next door, but twenty years later that was impossible. If he existed at all, he had already fled to Bedford Street or West 82nd.
Your folks were pretty active on the left, in a way that caused a lot of anxiety in the family. How did your memories of that tension inspire the book?
The book is set in New York City at the height of the Cold War, and everyone breathes in this atmosphere. How could they not? Two powerful nations, former allies, are now trying to scare each other to death. In the United States, anticommunist propaganda was so virulent and indiscriminate that the Left, relatively open in the Forties, was forced underground. Secrecy became a modus vivendi. We called ourselves progressives—adults and kids alike—not Reds, or Leftists, and never communists—the ideology that dare not speak its name. You can understand why when the most popular comic book displayed these headlines: “Superman battles the Red Crusher!” “Take that, you commie cur!” The word commie, itself, was awful. It was an invective as venomous as the N-word.
Now to me, progressives were, above all, antifascist, antiracist, pro-union, and lots of other good things I believed in—and still do. I’ve heard a whole lot about how doctrinaire this movement was and how Soviet influenced. Well, that got right past me as a kid. The real tension for progressive kids came from leading double lives. The barrage of Red-Scare tactics meant you had to keep secrets other kids didn’t even think about for fear of getting people you knew in trouble.
Keeping your mouth shut was an enormous issue, for adult or child. My mother suffered loss of the career she loved because she wouldn’t testify against fellow teachers to a state board. Name names, or else. She never considered naming anyone—Destroy a life?—and she had a healthy contempt for anyone who did. It must have been a hugely worrisome time, yet I don’t recall having any real fear because my folks kept their anxieties hidden from me. This had to be a heroic effort for my mother. She was the most dedicated of teachers and suffered greatly from the loss of identity her career gave her.
Clearly the character who most resembles me is the adolescent Rebecca. I, too, was warned not to talk to strangers at the door when my parents weren’t home. The strangers were the FBI, of course, but I didn’t lose sleep over this, and I don’t remember being very worried. Still, convinced as I am of the power of the unconscious mind, I now believe my sangfroid was an emotional defense—denial or repression. I had myself more firmly in control than did Rebecca. In her responses I embody feelings I would have had, were I able to react with emotional freedom.
The trial of the Rosenbergs for espionage is one of the historical threads that runs through the book. What were your memories of this trial growing up?
I knew the Rosenbergs had been accused of giving atomic secrets to the Russians and that my parents didn’t believe they were guilty. That much I had picked up at the dinner table, but I was only nine when they were convicted, and I didn’t think about it much. I became very aware of them some two years later when their execution drew near, at which time they had become an international cause celebre and often in the headlines.
I also know that some time later my folks doubted the Rosenbergs’ complete innocence, but they still felt the death sentence was unjust. My parents were both gone before the real involvement of Julius Rosenberg in Soviet espionage came to light, many years later.
Like my reaction to the Red Scare, my response to the Rosenberg execution was muted, and it was decades before I had anything resembling the strong responses Frima and Beth had to the executions. This finally happened while I was reading E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, that dark powerful fictional reimagining of the Rosenbergs and their kids. When I came to his unflinching description of the “Eisenbergs” in the electric chair, I broke into a sweat, began retching, and burst into tears. Just like Frima, I was breaking through unconscious barriers.
It feels very much like you’re trying to commemorate a time and place in American history.
I’m trying to hold the lens still on a time and place that obviously shaped me. My views have shifted often, but there are two characteristics that still define the Fifties for me. First is this pervading approval of the superficial—an earnest denial of substance and a pressure to be one-dimensional and neatly delineated. Your outside should be the same as your inside. Mainstream pop radio blares out “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window,” or “Cry,” achy-breaky, without any real ache or break. Doris Day is Calamity Jane, a perky gal who dresses in britches, totes a rifle, and runs a saloon. She secretly loves Wild Bill Hickcock whom she lands by singing and learning “a woman’s touch” and switching to frilly skirts. She’s now a fulfilled woman. At the same time Marlon Brando is “The Wild One.” The girls—all of us—swoon at this rebellious, moody motorcycle gang leader, and soon virtually every teenage boy in the neighborhood is sporting tight jeans, a black leather jacket—the whole ensemble—and, just like Marlon, showing that he is rebellious, moody and tortured. About what? Even Marlon couldn’t say—the script didn’t give him anything to work with. His image as a biker, an icon of the fifties, is as flat as the poster it’s printed on. What you see is what you get.
The other defining ethos: Orthodoxy reigns. Be you Marxist, Capitalist, or Druid, as a true believer you could live pretty comfortably, without doubt, conflict, or irony. A questioner could not. Frima and Beth are questioners who fight the tide, as are the men they turn to for love and emotional support. They know that to grow they must learn to live with uncertainty. That’s why they interest me and why I write about them.
Still, I look back to the 1950s with affection and new respect. The Tea Party and other such aberrations will do that to you. If, like me, you were white, middle class, straight, and healthy, and not, say, in need of an abortion, life was manageable. Most problems had solutions, and institutions had some accountability. You were well fed, and middle class neighborhoods like those in the Bronx were pleasant and affordable. Cheap, safe buses and trains gave you mobility; parks and public spaces were well maintained for you to enjoy. The safety net was solid and effective, and not even rightwing politicians were tampering with it. For all the political fear mongering, your right to vote was unassailable, and you felt that the Constitution of the United States had your back. And when you sent your kids to school you expected them to be well and safely educated. Not in your worst nightmare would you dream that a child leaving for school at eight AM would never again come home after the three PM bell rings. And that is saying a lot.
It’s inspiring that you wrote and published the book later in life. Can you comment on that?
Well, first, obviously, you are facing a different kind of deadline than a younger writer. You might croak before you finish, or worse yet lose some of your precious brain cells and synaptic connections. But beyond that it really is a kick and a new lease on life, and I never made a better decision than to quit teaching while I was still healthy and energetic and do this instead.
It’s also a distinction to be one of the world’s latest bloomers. There are actually more than a few of us, and for this we can thank the digital age and self publishing. At my first publishing workshop I was struck that the people attending were either very young or seniors, both groups determined to take a chance. You won’t make much money unless you’re already rich enough to manipulate the market, but you say what you want to say and how you want to say it. And, as I’ve said before, that’s saying a lot.
TAGS: Alice Rosenthal, Author Interview, fiction interview, interivew, new book, Steve Almond, Take the D Train
Review: Bess and Frima by Alice Rosenthal
October 20, 2018
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Summary
When Bess and Frima—best friends, both nineteen and from the same Jewish background in the Bronx—get summer jobs in upstate hotels near Monticello, NY, in June 1940, they have visions of romance . . . but very different expectations and needs. Frima, who seeks safety in love, finds it with the “boy next door,” who is also Bess’s brother. Meanwhile, rebellious Bess renames herself Beth and plunges into a new life with Vinny, an Italian American, former Catholic, left-wing labor leader from San Francisco. Her actions are totally unacceptable to her family—which is fine with Beth. Will their young loves have happy endings? Yes and no, for the shadow of world war is growing, and Beth and Frima must grow up fast. As their love lives entangle with war, ambitions, religion, family, and politics—all kinds of conventional expectations—they face challenges they never dreamed of in their struggles for personal and creative growth.
Review
Beth and Frima, a novel that takes place in the 40s, featues two best friends from the Bronx. A common bond of their Jewish heritage, we follow their evolution as young women through love, friendship, loss, family and cultural challenges.
Overall, the heart of the book was the friendship and Bess and Frima. It was a refreshing contrast seeing these women as they were through the influences of their time and the challenges they faced. Bess, being such a progessive and rebellious woman to not only the societal norms but her cultural ones, was such a great character to see break free to be in her own shell. Frima, who embodied conventional and traditional expectations found her way in the confines of who she was expected to be, found her way to be the best version of herself.Despite the challenges they faced, they always were their for each other no matter what which is so lovely to read novels featuring beautiful friendships.
There were other parts of the storylines that caught my interest such as the familial relationships and the supporting friendships which brought some nice elements to the book. I will say there were moments that I felt a bit drifted only because it feels like there was more to tell but had no affect on the interest of the main characters. I saw in the conclusion of the book this story continues which I found this book interesting enough to continue. I'm curious to see what happens next and experience the next chapter with them. Overall, I enjoyed reading the book and look forward to what's to come.