Janice Steinberg

In this, her sixth novel, Janice Steinberg, a tireless researcher and a gifted storyteller, covers 85 years in the lives of a Western Jewish clan in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, and elsewhere -- all of which she compresses into 336 pages of engagingly-composed English and, as needed, Yiddish.

The Tin Horse opens in 2006 when Elaine Greenstein Resnick -- an esteemed Los Angeles feminist and civil rights attorney, the surviving spouse of a long, compatible marriage, and the grandmother of three show more -- is at 85 preparing to retire. Slowing the process is the re-emergence of an excruciating family mystery that Elaine had put on hold decades ago. While sorting old papers, a clue surfaces suggesting that Barbara, her fraternal twin who at 18 had vanished, may still be alive.

The progress of her search for her sister alternates with colorfully detailed accounts of the twins' lives between 1921 and 1939 when the Heights was a mixed immigrant, working- to lower-class neighborhood. As a native and 20-year resident of Boyle Heights around that period, I can confirm that it was a place where, as described, Jews and Mexicans (its largest minorities), as well as smaller groups of Japanese, Italians, Greeks, Armenians and Russians, developed mini-homelands, settling on streets close to their churches and stores, along with an occasional American family, white or black, who rooted where welcomed. I can also confirm that when the Great Depression hit, everyone suffered, some dramatically.

Rather than focusing on interaction between these diverse groups, Steinberg, a master at characterization, artfully crafts dozens of fully-realized individuals, most of them Jewish. In the more than eight decades of her story, Steinberg makes Elaine a prime example of the Jews and others who left the neighborhood with a lifelong commitment to the multicultural ethos practiced throughout their young lives in the public schools, libraries and playgrounds of Boyle Heights. show less

First of all, I read this book because my grandparents lived in this area of California when my dad was a child; but by the time I came along they had long since moved. I recently found out about this bit of family history after my dad died. My dad, like one of the twins in this novel, never embraced his Jewishness, and like many refugees from Eastern Europe and other soviet blocked countries, his parents didn’t speak, at least around us, about the old country. I feel grateful that Janice show more Steinberg brought this time and place alive, and that I got so much more than a history lesson.

It is the story of twins, Barbara and Elaine, growing up in the 1930’s in Boyle Heights California. Elaine, who is in her 80’s is getting ready to move into a retirement community, and as she downsizes, she comes across something that brings back memories of her sister Barbara, who had walked away from the family and disappeared right before America’s involvement in WWII. Elaine’s search for what had happened to Barbara makes this an emotionally charged 5 star mystery. Be advised that there are adult situations and some sexual content that would not be suitable for some readers. show less

Like any family worth its salt, this fictional family has secrets and dissension, love and hate and loyalties and betrayals. And like the best of fictional families, this one seemed very real to me.

Elaine, one of the daughters in this close-knit family and now an old woman moving into a retirement community, reluctantly decides to try to find out what happened to a sibling decades after last seeing her. From early-Hitler Romania to modern-day Los Angeles, the Jewish family has quite a story show more to tell but it happens in bits and pieces, jumping back and forth in time, and it's done very well.

The story is much like other immigrant stories, desperation and survival, sometimes triumph, but this one is beautifully written without being flowery, and I love the way it circles around on itself. Relationships are real and flawed. Decisions are not always wise. Some of the loose ends are tied up in the end, but not as just a neat, happy package. It's messy and contradictory and altogether believable. As a fan of well-written sagas, I very much enjoyed this one.

I was given an advance reader's copy of the book for review. show less

Elaine Greenstein is archiving her life. In her mid-80s, the widowed, retired crusading lawyer is preparing to move to a retirement community and is cleaning out her house. She is assisted by Josh, a doctoral candidate at USC, who is helping identify material for an archive of her papers that the school is compiling.

Elaine had forgotten about the department-store boxes of her mother's papers that she shoved in the back of a closet after her mother's death. These boxes set Elaine down a path show more of memory to her childhood in the old neighborhood of Boyle Heights, where a lively community of Jewish immigrants worked and went to school with Mexicans, Asians and others who'd come to Los Angeles to achieve their American dream.

Elaine's childhood ended painfully when her free-spirited twin sister, Barbara, ran off and was never heard from again. One of the boxes seems to hold a clue to where Barbara might have gone, and Elaine––with Josh's eager assistance––feels compelled to take her one last chance to finding her sister.

Janice Steinberg vividly portrays the bitter and sweet of working-class immigrant Jewish life in Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. This is not a world I've read about before and it was the strongest part of the book, in its descriptions of stores, streetcars (no need for a car in Los Angeles!), crafts work in early Hollywood, union organizing in the garment business, the rise of Zionism, the arrival of refugees from fascist and Nazi Europe, and dealing with American-style casual anti-Semitism as the Greensteins and their friends begin to go to school and work outside the neighborhood.

In the stories told by Elaine's family, Steinberg also shows us the hardships and terrors of the old country that drove Elaine's ancestors to the new land. The book is a personal history too, of Elaine's whole extended family and of how you can love and hate your family, often at the same time. As with most stories about twins, an important part of the theme is the mixed feelings of guilt, resentment and excitement as the pair development their own, independent identities.

While this is a story well told, with strong characters, I have a couple of problems with it. The flashback story of the teenage Elaine, Barbara and Danny, a boy they both dated, sometimes crosses the line into soap opera territory. Another part of the flashback story includes the fictional detective Philip Marlowe. Plopping a legendary fictional character down in the middle of this took me out of the story. In an author's note on the Amazon product page, Steinberg explains that the character of Elaine as a young woman was inspired by the young woman in the Los Angeles bookstore whom Philip Marlowe has a memorable encounter with in The Big Sleep. Well, alright, that's an explanation, but using Philip Marlowe in this book was too much of a clash of fictional realities for me.

The problems I have with the story weren't serious enough to cause more than the loss of one star. For anyone interested in multi-generational family dramas or stories of the immigrant experience, this is a novel well worth reading. show less