An Evening with Anita Diamant: “The Boston Girl”
Please join us to discuss “The Boston Girl” by Anita Diamant. The author will be in attendance to join the discussion and answer all of our questions!
This event is free to attend, RSVP required.
About The Boston Girl:
The Boston Girl is told through the eyes of Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. It is a coming-of-age story about family ties and values, about immigration and generational change, about friendship and feminism.
Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for the effect that America would have on three daughters. Growing up in the North End –at the time a teeming multicultural neighborhood—Addie’s intelligence and curiosity lead her to a world her parents can’t imagine, a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love.
Eighty-five-year-old Addie tells the story of her life to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, who has asked her “How did you get to be the woman you are today.” She begins in 1915, the year she found her voice and made friends who would help shape the course of her life. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, Addie recalls her adventures with compassion for the naïve girl she was.
She remembers staying at Rockport Lodge, a sort of “fresh air fund” resort located in a seaside town north of Boston, where she makes friends, who are part of a life that spans World War I, the influenza epidemic, and the Great Depression.
The Boston Girl is a moving portrait of one woman’s complicated life in twentieth century America, and a how a generation of women found their place in a changing world.
About Anita Diamant
Anita Diamant is a writer whose work includes fiction, journalism, essays, and guidebooks to contemporary Jewish life.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, she grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and Denver, Colorado. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in comparative literature and earned a Master’s in American literature from Binghamton University in upstate New York.
Anita is best-known for The Red Tent, published in 1997. Inspired by a few lines from Genesis, the novel tells the story of an obscure and overlooked character named Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob and Leah. The Red Tent became a word-of-mouth bestseller thanks to reader recommendations, book groups, and support from independent bookstores. In 2001, the Independent Booksellers Alliance named The Red Tent as the year’s “Booksense Best Fiction.” The Red Tent has been published in more than 25 countries, including England, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Spain, and Sweden. In 2014, the book was adapted as a two-part, four-hour miniseries by Lifetime TV.
The Boston Girl is the story of Addie Baum, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. The novel begins when Addie’s twenty-two year old granddaughter asks, “How did you get to be the woman you are today?”
Over the years, Anita has revised and updated several of her books about Jewish life, including, The Jewish Wedding Now (originally The New Jewish Wedding), Living a Jewish Life, Choosing a Jewish Life, and Saying Kaddish.
Anita Diamant is the founding president Mayyim Hayyim, Living Waters Community Mikveh and Education Center in Newton Massachusetts — a reinvention of the ancient Jewish tradition of mikveh, ritual immersion in water. Visit Mayyim Hayyim for more information.