Memories of Immigrant Life: Marie Jastrow’s A Time to Remember: Growing Up in New York before the Great War (1979)

In her coming-of-age memoir, A Time to Remember: Growing Up in New York before the Great War (1979), Marie Jastrow, a Jewish-American immigrant woman, cleverly captures the daily life of her family in Yorkville, New York City, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Jastrow recalls the difficulties she and her parents had to face during their first years in the United States, between 1907 and 1918, and the ways in which they managed to adapt to the social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances of the new environment. Therefore, this essay sets out to explore how Jastrow’s family members succeeded in negotiating the challenges of a gendered immigrant experience.