Modern Girls

Modern Girls by Jennifer S. Brown was actually not what I expected.  I thought it would be a story about young working girls living in a more modern style than their mothers, working, going out to parties and drinking with friends after work at the local bar. 

Every generation wants to think of itself as more modern and experienced than the last.  Every parent dreams that their children will be better off than they were.  They work hard to give their children all the advantages that they could not afford or were not available to them.  Yet, each child has to be their own person.  Children are independent and take chances that lead them down the path they must take in life.   Parents can only advise and maybe be there to pick up the pieces when things don't turn out perfectly.  Every daughter thinks she is more knowledgeable than her mother, is sometimes embarrassed by her mother, and feels she is more stylish than her mother.

Modern Girls is set in 1935, New York City.  Dottie still lives at home with her parents and brothers on the Lower Eastside of NY.  She has grown beyond her neighborhood by getting a job at Dover Insurance and she has just been promoted from an office girl to the head bookkeeper because she has a talent for numbers.  She has a long time boyfriend, Abe Rabinowitz, her devout and Dottie hopes, devoted boyfriend who she is hoping to marry.  Until things go horribly wrong, and in an effort to make Abe jealous, Dottie spends a night with Willie Klein.

Dottie has prided herself on being modern, working, dressing in the most fashionable clothes.  But, when she becomes in a family way without the benefit of marriage, she must figure out how modern she really is.  

In a parallel plot line, her mother Rose, an immigrant who came to America and married twenty years ago, now the mother of five children, is just finding her light at the end of the parenting tunnel.  Feeling that she can go out and socialize with her women friends and work for social justice causes with her friends, she is not ready to start all over when she finds out that she is pregnant again.  

Rose is feeling old and tired to start over with a new baby, with feedings and dirty diapers.  She is frustrated that she will not be able to help organize a letter writing campaign to encourage the United States government to relax the quotas for Jews coming into the country from Europe as reports are filtering in about the horrors of Hitler in Germany.

Two women at different stages in their lives facing major changes in their lifestyles.  Each must make an important choice and decision that will change their lives forever.

Also explored through this novel is the difference between living on the Lower Eastside and Park Avenue.  Rose and Dottie live with the Jewish immigrant population, where Yiddish is still the primary language spoken.  Willie Klein who is the father of Dottie's baby, and his family have left the old world behind and are integrating into American society.  "In the city, I didn't see Willie too often.  His parents had distanced themselves from the lower East Side, taken to their Park Avenue address with full body and soul.  ... mostly he stayed in his own world except to partake every now and then in the Yiddishe  nightlife.  His parents thought the cramped and crowded Lower East Side - the shaddachan making marriages, the peddlers on the street - an embarrassment, a throwback to life in the Old Country, even though neither had experienced it."

How Rose and Dottie come to terms with and deal with their pregnancies is admirable and touching, which makes Modern Girls a charming and engaging read.