{"id":445,"date":"2011-06-29T06:32:33","date_gmt":"2011-06-29T13:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=445"},"modified":"2011-06-29T06:33:19","modified_gmt":"2011-06-29T13:33:19","slug":"445","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=445","title":{"rendered":"Another place, another time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Wishnevsky takes a look at a first novel that intrigues him as much for the history it offers as for the story it tells.<\/p>\n

By Stephen Wishnevsky<\/p>\n

LOISAIDA. By Dan Chodorkoff. Fomite. 348 pages. $14.95.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This is an interesting first novel, a bit stiff perhaps, but a valuable look at an erased piece of New York City history, and a recounting of the forces that erased that history.<\/p>\n

Dan Chodorkoff is a co-founder of something called the Institute of Social Ecology, a cultural anthropologist and a longtime political activist. All of these professional traits flavor this book, more of a history perhaps than a rockem-sockem counter-cultural novel. A worthwhile read, however.<\/p>\n

“Loisaida” is a Spanish pronunciation of “Lower East Side.” And there are several books with this title, fiction and fact. In this volume, Catherine, a young Jewish girl from the suburbs, has dropped out of her comfortable life and moved into a “squat,” an abandoned building on the Lower East Side, probably in the 1980s. She has a boyfriend, Mike, who plays in a band, and a couple of jobs, as a waitron and as a writer for an underground paper. Her boss at the paper, the Avalanche<\/em>, is a doctrinaire activist for some cause defined only by himself. He calls himself an Anarchist, comes from a wealthy family and is a bit of a prick. The primary thrust of the novel concerns the attempt of a Hispanic developer to build apartments on a recycled bit of wasteland where the local Puerto Rican community activist has improvised a neighborhood people’s park.<\/p>\n

The flow of the novel is predictable, even preordained. The developer tries to buy off the activist, the anarchist starts a riot discrediting the squatters, Cathy leads a revolt to take over the Avalanche<\/em>, and the developer harasses her, and has her and her friends evicted from their squat. Things get bad; then they get worse.<\/p>\n

What makes this book rise above the usual is Cathy’s relationship with her dying great-grandmother, who was a real anarchist and socialist at the turn of the century. She had escaped a pogrom in Czarist Russia, was involved with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and tells a century\u2019s worth of tales about the Jewish Left. Good stuff. Good history.<\/p>\n

Of course, it ends badly, the poor never win, and the punk anarchists never had any of the discipline that the World War I Reds had. I find the language nowhere nearly obscene enough; I spent a few weeks in that place at that time, crashing down on Avenue D in 1989 or so. But it\u2019s a worthwhile read. You should check it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Wishnevsky takes a look at a first novel that intrigues him as much for the history it offers as for the story it tells. By Stephen Wishnevsky LOISAIDA. By Dan Chodorkoff. Fomite. 348 pages. $14.95. This is an interesting first novel, a bit stiff perhaps, but a valuable look at an erased piece of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[106,107,108],"class_list":["post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","category-historical-fiction","tag-chordokoff","tag-loisaida","tag-wisnhevsky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}