The Human Tragicomedy (Blue Hill Avenue, by Mark Mirsky)

Blue Hill Avenue By Mark Mirsky Bobbs-Merrill, 177 pp., $6.95

Just after the First World War Blue Hill Avenue, the old turnpike running through Dorchester to Mattapan Square, was the center of Boston’s Jewry. Mattapan itself was more a community or kahal than a ghetto, a teeming Jewish throng that formed the city’s most densely populated ward. The Jews of Mattapan were Galician, as remote from Boston’s genteel, wealthy, assimilated German Jews as if they had never crossed the Atlantic. The elders wore their yarmulkes as they sat on the three-decker porches on long summer evenings. The women still wore wigs. And if the bearded rabbis had given up flat fur-trimmed hats, they did wear wide-brimmed black ones that seemed a piece with their kaftan-like coats. On Saturday night Blue Hill Avenue echoed the variegated shrillness of a street in Lodz, the lights flaring in all the small shops, fruit and vegetable pushcarts lining the curbs, peddlers shouting their wares, men with their hats on sitting at delicatessen counters drinking tea from glasses; a noisy, bright, pushing, shifting kaleidoscopic mass.

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Francis Russell

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Blue Hill Avenue By Mark Mirsky Bobbs-Merrill, 177 pp., $6.95

Just after the First World War Blue Hill Avenue, the old turnpike running through Dorchester to Mattapan Square, was the center of Boston’s Jewry. Mattapan itself was more a community or kahal than a ghetto, a teeming Jewish throng that formed the city’s most densely populated ward. The Jews of Mattapan were Galician, as remote from Boston’s genteel, wealthy, assimilated German Jews as if they had never crossed the Atlantic. The elders wore their yarmulkes as they sat on the three-decker porches on long summer evenings. The women still wore wigs. And if the bearded rabbis had given up flat fur-trimmed hats, they did wear wide-brimmed black ones that seemed a piece with their kaftan-like coats. On Saturday night Blue Hill Avenue echoed the variegated shrillness of a street in Lodz, the lights flaring in all the small shops, fruit and vegetable pushcarts lining the curbs, peddlers shouting their wares, men with their hats on sitting at delicatessen counters drinking tea from glasses; a noisy, bright, pushing, shifting kaleidoscopic mass.