LREI: Library/Resources

All Eleventh Graders take Gotham - The History of New York City during one of the three trimesters. The summer reading for the eleventh grade this year is Dreamland, by author Kevin Baker. The novel depicts life in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Dreamland is quite a long novel, but I think it will keep you absolutely mesmerized. It is a vibrant, colorful and thrilling, breathtaking in its scope and ambition. Dreamland has something for everyone - immigrants drawn to the promise of America and finding instead life in the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan; Bowery boys and gang hoodlums mixing it up in saloons; and assorted gangsters, hucksters, factory workers, politicians, radicals, reformers, murderers, and sideshow oddities. There are lots of sideshow oddities, including a community of little people who inhabit a Little City of their own at one of Coney Island's three original amusement parks -- the Dreamland of the title. Dreamland is, of course, also a metaphor for the city of dreams that was New York itself. And the title contains yet a third reference, to that world of dreams - and nightmares - disclosed during the era by Sigmund Freud, whose American adventure in 1908 makes up yet another one of the subplots of the novel.

In Dreamland , Kevin Baker takes us on a literary roller coaster ride that parallels the rides at Coney Island. The book's many subplots whisk us at breakneck speed through scenes of gritty realism on the one hand and weird, dreamscapes on the other, dreamscapes that, like some hall of distorted mirrors, may depict the outsized and outrageous reality of the period better than social realism does. However, that is for you to decide.

The book's cast includes a host of original creations as well as characters drawn from the pages of the era's history. At the center of the book, however, is a love story, and at the center of the love story is the book's most realized character Esther Abramowitz, a sewing machine worker from the Lower East Side, the daughter of unassimilated Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Esther, I think you will discover, is the moral authority of the book. She works in one of the many garment sweatshops of the period - a rather famous one, in fact, called the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. Her story unfolds in the context of the fatal rivalry and ultimate showdown between her lover (the good guy) and her brother (the bad guy). This private story in turn unfolds in the context of the social history of these tumultuous years. Esther encounters the women's movement and the labor movement as she and her sister workers face off against industrial robber barons, police brutality, and the corrupt government of New York led by Tammany Hall. Most of the book's characters at some point cross paths with one another as their stories of love, power, revenge, heroism and tragedy interweave and shine in the artificial electric dazzle of the wondrous place called Dreamland. I will not tell you how it ends, but I think you will like it and l think you'll learn a great deal about the period.

For your summer reading assignment, answer the following two questions. Each answer should be between one and two pages in length, in 11-point font, with 1.5 spaces between each line. The assignment is to be handed in at the beginning of the year, regardless of what trimester you have Gotham.

Describe Esther's growth as a woman, as a politically conscious worker and as an activist. How did she change? What individuals and what experiences influenced her. Describe her mature beliefs and values. What do you admire most about Esther?

Identify the aspects of turn of the century New York that you learned the most about from reading Dreamland. From among the wide array of historical characters and events - either contrived or drawn from the history books - in the book, choose three that intrigue, astonish, anger, or inspire you. Explain why. Do these aspects of the book strike you as surprising or unrealistic? Why? Do a little research on the internet or in your library to see if the historical record confirms in broad outline - or in any particular - events and people as depicted in the novel.