Only Yesterday

It Is not true that happy nations have no history. They merely have a different sort of history—the kind that Francis Russell is preeminently qualified to write.

In The Great Interlude Mr. Russell deals with a time and a place. The time is that of the ’teens and the twenties of the century—a period of sharp and vivid “this was your life” nostalgia for me since it coincided for the most part with my own ’teens and twenties. The place is Greater Boston, which is just north of the part of New England that is home to me. I expected to discover some significant differences between Mr. Russell’s Boston and my own Connecticut, but I found practically none. The reason I should guess, is that Mr. Russell is not a Proper Bostonian, but a Dorchester boy— and Dorchester, though contiguous to Boston itself, was, in Mr. Russell’s youth, urban New England without any trace of Brahmin patina. With its mixture of American-Protestant lower-middle class Yankees, three-decker “Jewvilles,” Roman Catholic Irish just three generations away from the potato famine, and odd infusions of Scots and Scandinavians, Dorchester comes through to me with peculiar force as being almost a mirror image of the Park Street section of the New Haven, Connecticut in which I grew up.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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It Is not true that happy nations have no history. They merely have a different sort of history—the kind that Francis Russell is preeminently qualified to write.

In The Great Interlude Mr. Russell deals with a time and a place. The time is that of the ’teens and the twenties of the century—a period of sharp and vivid “this was your life” nostalgia for me since it coincided for the most part with my own ’teens and twenties. The place is Greater Boston, which is just north of the part of New England that is home to me. I expected to discover some significant differences between Mr. Russell’s Boston and my own Connecticut, but I found practically none. The reason I should guess, is that Mr. Russell is not a Proper Bostonian, but a Dorchester boy— and Dorchester, though contiguous to Boston itself, was, in Mr. Russell’s youth, urban New England without any trace of Brahmin patina. With its mixture of American-Protestant lower-middle class Yankees, three-decker “Jewvilles,” Roman Catholic Irish just three generations away from the potato famine, and odd infusions of Scots and Scandinavians, Dorchester comes through to me with peculiar force as being almost a mirror image of the Park Street section of the New Haven, Connecticut in which I grew up.