Button Man, by Andrew Gross

[Stacey]

"Twenty million immigrants came to this country between 1880 and 1920, and in many ways, this is the story of one of them."

Button Man conveys the once upon a time in America story, when immigrants came to our shores in search of a better existence and found a hardscrabble life awaiting them. Gross' novel is the tale of a struggling Jewish immigrant family who settled, as so many did, on New York's Lower East Side at the beginning of the 20th century. Life proved difficult for all immigrants: discrimination and poverty set against a foreign land and an unknown language. Surprisingly, I'd never known that Jews faced blatant discrimination even from their own kind during that period - i.e. German Jews vs. Central Eastern European Jews. While much of it has been glorified through the years in the guise of the great American dream, I can't even imagine how brutal life was for these newly arrived immigrants during these times.

As for the novel, Gross takes us back in time to 1902 and the story of the Rabishevsky boys and their worldly pursuits. The novel revolves around self-made, pulled-up-by-his-own-bootstraps garmento Morris, who is clearly the übermensch amongst the corrupt, the "deese-and-dose" guys and the Jewish "Murder Inc." mob, who controlled the labor unions of the 1920's-30's. The novel is heavily character-driven and Gross' finest moments can be found in the realistic, early 20th c. dialogue between these colorful characters, driving the plot forward with heavy import at every turn. I liked this old-fashioned crime thriller with a big heart and lots of soul, inbued with undertones of both The Godfather and Goodfellas throughout. In fact, guilt-ridden brother Harry reminded me a lot of Freddo. My one sore point with the book is that for most of it, Gross spotlights Morris, narrating the book from his POV. Then suddenly, it digresses, shifting entirely to mob-related events and Morris disappears until nearly the end. But that peeve is really small potatoes. Read this book! I hope novels like these are always around to remind us of our place in history and a forgotten time that once really did exist in the world.

This was a fantastic choice for Week 8: 2 books related to the same topic, genre, or theme, where my theme is the American Immigrant Experience: Then & Now, the novel appropriately my "then". My companion read on the theme, or the "now", is America Ferrara's American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures.