A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith – Mar 23, 2026

 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith – first edition of the 1943 novel

Published in 1943, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows Francie Nolan, a young girl growing up in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn during the first two decades of the 20th century. The novel traces her childhood, adolescence, and coming of age amid poverty, family struggles, and the resilience of her Irish-American family. Her father, Johnny, is a charming but alcoholic singing waiter; her mother, Katie, works as a janitor to keep the family together. Through Francie’s eyes, the story captures the daily hardships – hunger, sacrifice, and the relentless pursuit of education – as she finds solace in reading and determination to build a better life. The title refers to the Tree of Heaven, a hardy weed that grows in tenement courtyards, symbolising the stubborn will to thrive against all odds.

James Dunn and Peggy Ann Garner in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) film directed by Elia Kazan

Its Place in Young Adult Fiction in the USA

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is often regarded as a forerunner of modern young adult literature. While it was published as a mainstream novel, its focus on a young protagonist’s internal world, her journey toward self‑awareness, and the realistic depiction of poverty and family, earned it a lasting place in the canon of American literature read by adolescents. It bridged the gap between adult fiction and the emerging genre of YA by:

Katie and Neeley chat about the tree that has been cut

– Centering a teenage girl’s perspective with honesty and depth, paving the way for later YA classics.

– Addressing complex themes—alcoholism, class, gender expectations, sexual awakening, and the value of education – without condescension.

– Being widely assigned in schools for generations, it became a staple of adolescent reading in America alongside The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Though the YA category did not formally exist in the 1940s, the novel’s enduring appeal to young readers and its place in school curricula have cemented its status as a foundational work of what would become young adult fiction.

Aunt Sissy with Francie and Neely on the stoop of their tenement

What It Brings Out About Immigrants’ Struggle in America

The novel vividly portrays the immigrant experience through the Nolans, who are second‑generation Irish Americans. Key themes include:

– Poverty and upward mobility: The family’s precarious economic existence – saving pennies, scavenging, and sacrificing – reflects the common immigrant reality of living on the margins while striving for stability.

– Education as the escape route: Francie’s determination to stay in school and her love of reading embody the belief that education is the primary means for immigrant families to rise.

– Cultural identity and shame: The Nolans have internalised some of the prejudices of the time; they distance themselves from more recent immigrants while still facing discrimination. The novel explores the tension between assimilation and preserving dignity.

– Resilience and the “American Dream”: The story neither romanticises nor dismisses the dream of a better life. Instead, it shows the slow, painful, and often compromised progress that many immigrant families experienced, holding onto hope through small victories, like owning a home or seeing a child graduate.

Francie goes to borrow books from the public library

In sum, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn remains a powerful depiction of how immigrants and their children navigated poverty, identity, and aspiration in early‑20th‑century America, and it helped shape the tradition of honest, youth‑centred storytelling in American literature.

Movie Poster for the 1945 film 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' from which many scenes have been illustrated in this blog

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - 75th anniversary edition

Poetry Session – Feb 20, 2026

 

Ten of us participated in a session that featured poets, all of whom had been recited before with the exception of Bruce Springsteen, a singer-songwriter who penned the lyrics of a contemporary protest song.

Arundhaty gave us an ekphrastic anti-war poem by Mary Oliver that takes off on a painting of blue horses by Franz Marc.

I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses

what war is.

They would either faint in horror, or simply

find it impossible to believe.

Devika chose a cryptic poem by Emily Dickinson in which she seems to dare God to take away a beloved person she has known. 

Significance that each has lived

The other to detect

Discovery not God himself

Could now annihilate

Geetha recited the ‘dub’ poet Benjamin Zephaniah who performs on stage, reciting poems mostly to reggae rhythms. 

Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops

De tongue fires a riddim dat shoots like shots

Dis poetry is designed fe rantin

Dance hall style, big mouth chanting,

Joe was upset by the menacing way in which US Immigration authorities used military-style kidnaps to strike fear into the hearts of non-whites in America. It was so antithetical to the tenets of freedom of life and liberty enshrined in the US Constitution that it horrified many Americans; Bruce Springsteen gave voice to the horror in the song, The Streets of Minneapolis.

Now they say they're here to uphold the law

But they trample on our rights

If your skin is black or brown, my friend

You can be questioned or deported on sight

KumKum read a ’tiny’ 10-line poem by Louise Glück that ends abruptly with the cry

I want you.

Joe mentioned that when he read Louise Glück, he bought her volume of Poems 1962-2012. After reading almost the whole collection he chose a few that he could make sense of. But later he had a dream conversation with the poet in verse which is reported in the text below.

Pamela liked Mary Oliver’s poetry for its simplicity and freedom from constraints; reassuringly the poet states –

I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish.

I’m just chattering.

Priya took on Rabindranath Tagore. There are more distinct blog posts on KRG’s website on him than on any other poet – the posts were to celebrate his 150th Birth anniversary in 2011. The eighth such post contains a song that  pulls at the heartstrings, no matter how many times one hears it. That a poet could express such a yearning for a person, indirectly, is a miracle. In Hemanta Mukherjee’s baritone voce it takes on the life Tagore meant to infuse into the words. Listen here to the song Tumi Ki Kebali Chabi. The translation is Joe’s. Has any poet expressed the source of his muse better? –

kabir antharer tumi kabi

you are the poet within the poet

Saras took up Robert Service in an anti-war poem he wrote on the eve of WWI:

Rumours of world-war are rife,

Armageddon draweth near.

If your carcase you would save,

Hear, oh hear, the dreadful drum!

Fly to forest, cower in cave . . .

Brother, heed the wrath to come!

Shoba’s choice of England’s great poet Alfred Lord Tennyson was characterised by an elegiac poem which he derived from that fifteenth-century classic of English, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur. It contains the famous quote:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways

Thomo chose the first Duino Elegy of Rilke, which begins an intensely religious, mystical group of poems that employs the symbolism of angels and salvation. It begins:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?

He began the cycle of elegies in 1912 in the castle of Duino in Italy and completed it 10 years later in the smaller castle of Château de Muzot in the Swiss Valais. A castle composing poet, our Rilke was.

The Garden Party And Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield – Jan 26, 2026

 

The Garden Party first edition 1922

During the reading and discussions several points came up repeatedly. These have been gathered together below as a prologue to the readings themselves.

1. Class Divide

Why does class divide play such a major role in Mansfield's short stories? She used her writing to critically expose the rigid social hierarchies and their associated prejudices during the early 20th-century society. Her stories are deeply influenced by her own upbringing in a wealthy New Zealand family that resided on the edge of a poor district, and served as a mirror to the inequalities she observed in both colonial New Zealand and London. 

Mansfield often highlights the selfishness of the upper class, showing how they maintain their luxurious lifestyles through the labor of the working class while remaining indifferent to the latter's suffering. She might have been a Marxist in a different era. George Orwell, Edith Wharton, and D.H. Lawrence, were famous for exploring the class divide in Britain and America.

Class consciousness was indoctrinated into children, causing them to treat peers as inferior based on their socioeconomic status. This too Mansfield decided was worth exposing – how children are brought up in wealthy households to disdain the working classes. 

The enlightenment of  Laura in The Garden Party, who emancipates herself  from the class consciousness she was born into is an exemplary moment that Mansfield wants to convey to her readers: you can overcome prejudice if you think with your heart as well as your mind.

2. The short story form as inferior

The short story is often unjustly considered an inferior genre compared to the novel, largely due to its brevity and focus on a single, intense moment rather than expansive, complex narratives. The brevity imposes limitations in character development, and narrative, and make it appear less substantial. But masters of the short story know it requires immense precision, skill and focus. 

True it is a slice of life rather than the whole loaf, and if the short story makes a point, it is a sharp point not a whole massive structure that has to be unravelled slowly to discover its essence.

Writing a short story is challenging because it requires maximum impact with minimal words. Every sentence must serve a specific purpose, either developing the plot or revealing the character(s). Writers must cut scenes and descriptions that do not directly contribute to the central theme or conflict. It is often necessary to start in the middle of the action, avoiding lengthy exposition or scene-setting. There is no time to waste. The world has seen great short story writers – from the time of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales. Modern masters come from all parts of the world: Alice Munro (Canada), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Ernest Hemingway (USA), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Edgar Allan Poe (USA), Guy de Maupassant (France), James Joyce (Ireland), Rabindranath Tagore (India), and the list goes on.

Anton Chekhov, renowned Russian playwright and short-story writer

For the same reason of time, a short story can typically only focus on two or three main characters. Evolution of the characters and any significant change must happen quickly without feeling forced or abrupt. 

The most important thing is that a successful short story must revolve around a central theme with perhaps, a few interconnected complications.

Coming to the ending, short stories rely on a surprise, a twist, or a profound revelatory conclusion.

3. Mansfield’s life as a writer and its associations

Katherine Mansfield was a rare New Zealand writer to achieve international renown. She left for Europe as a 19-year-old. This sensitive documentary examines her relationships with her family and homeland, her turbulent personal life, her writing, and her early death in France in 1923, at age 34. It quotes extensively from her letters to give an account of the years of her productive life. 

John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield in France 1921

John Middleton Murry (1889 – 1957) was an English writer. He was a prolific author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918 as her second husband. Following Mansfield's death, Murry edited her work.

It seems that Mansfield wrote the short story, The Garden-Party, while she was dying of tuberculosis. Middleton Murray, her husband and primary publisher, wrote of his wife, “She loved life—with all its beauty and its pain.” In the story Laura experiences both the beauty and the pain of life, but Mansfield leaves Laura at the end of the story groping for a satisfactory definition of life.

4. The stories

Marriage à la Mode depicts the quiet tragedy of a marriage undone by incompatible desires and societal pressures, where neither partner truly understands the changes occurring in the other, resulting in mutual dissatisfaction and an ironic, sad conclusion. 

The Stranger is concerned with how death affects the living, and in this respect it is like that of Mansfield’s two other short stories in this collection, Daughters of the Late Colonel and The Garden Party. In The Stranger  Mrs.Hammond returning from a long absence  has been greatly affected by the death of a passenger on the ship who dies in her arms. She seems distant and not very responsive to her surroundings after the experience, “She made no answer. She was looking away from him at the fire.” But the deaths also touches Mr. Hammond and deprives him of an intimacy that he has been yearning for.

Miss Brill analyses loneliness, illusion vs. reality, and aging, through the story of a fragile, solitary woman who creates a fantasy world where she's an actress in a grand play, only to have it shattered by a young couple's cruel words. Those words reveal her isolation and lead her to retreat like her fur, crying, into her “little dark room.” It explores the theme of social alienation. 

Her art of writing is described by Mansfield in relation to this story in one of her letters: 

I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence—I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit [Miss Brill] on that day at that very moment. After I’d written it I read it aloud—number of times—just as one would play over a musical composition, try to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill—until it fitted her. 

5. Her colonial locales

Many of the stories in Katherine Mansfield's collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories, are written with a New Zealand locale. The specific story The Garden Party is explicitly set in Wellington, New Zealand, and is based on her own childhood home.  It pictures the cloudless blue sky “veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer”  and the karaka trees “with their broad, gleaming leaves, and their clusters of yellow fruit.” They stand in contrast to the “mean little cottages” down the hill that reflect the real-life landscape and class distinctions of Mansfield's youth.  Its luxurious setting is based on Mansfield's childhood home at 133 Tinakori Road (originally numbered 75), the second of three houses in Thorndon, Wellington that her family lived in.

Katherine Mansfield House and Garden was her early childhood home

The collection features fifteen stories in total; while many are set in her native New Zealand, others are set in England and the French Riviera, reflecting where she lived at various points in her life. 

Her work often explores New Zealand identity, social class, and gender roles within that specific colonial context. 

Arundhati Roy Interviewed by Mohan Vellapally on Dec 30, 2025 about her Memoir

 

Arundhati Roy and Mohan Vellapally on stage at Pulse on Dec 30, 2025

Ms Arundhati Roy gave an interview at an event on Dec 30, 2025 where her memoir was re-examined by Mr Mohan Vellapally, who brought out its finer points by asking a number of questions. Ms Roy responded in the time available with incisive comments, and to further elaborate, read sections of her memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me. This threw light on various facets of the complex relationship between her and her mother.

Arundhati Roy with Rema and Mohan Vellapally in their home

It became clear that her visits worldwide for readings of the memoir are not merely for marketing, but in her case establishes the essential contact between her and her readers that matters so much to her. A previous blog post shows just how she goes about cultivating her loyal, adoring, fan base by extending her love to them. It is an important counter-balance because she has a large number of detractors among the conservative right wing factions in India who habitually hurl epithets like ‘urban Naxal’ and ‘anti-national’ at her.

Raina John and Lalith Roy sing the Beatles song ‘Mother Mary Comes To Me’

The reading and interview was preceded by by the Beatles song Mother Mary Comes To Me sung by her brother Lalith Roy with Raina John:

https://www.instagram.com/pulse.unplugged/reel/DTIGKFNESAP/

Arundhati Roy began her readings by acknowledging the beautiful event her brother Lalith put together

The interview with Ms Aurundhati Roy was conducted by Mohan Vellapally at the beautiful auditorium Lalith Roy built in his Pulse centre for performing musicians. Here is the entire 1-hour interview on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTIPpkkk8y5/

During the course of the interview Ms Roy brought up various topics which are of interest to readers everywhere. In this blog post I cover a few under the headings below.

Kavita with Arundhati Roy posing at the book signing.

Humorous Poems – Dec 5, 2025

It was a delightful evening of enjoyment, which started off with a high tea of fabulous snacks contributed by all the readers, and enjoyed in the warm hospitality of Arundhaty’s home. 

The Reading Group outside by the lawn

The group inside – Pamela had left

KRG Readers gathered for the year-end joyful session of Humorous Poems where by custom everyone wears fanciful costumes, often illustrating the poem they are going to read. They make a motley crew glad to drop all pretence of literary accomplishment for the fun of having a rollicking time with stories in rhyme that reveal the light touch in poets, even those as venerable as T.S. Eliot.

The sad comic poet Edward Lear could not be omitted as he was the founder of the Limerick poetic form which  features anapaests rhymed AABBA fashion in 5-line stanzas to celebrate comical events. There is the famous one about Calcutta:

There once was a man from Calcutta

Who coated his throat with butta

Thus converting his snore

From a thunderous roar

To a soft, melodious mutta.

(L. Kilham)

Here’s a tribute to Lear:

Although at the limericks of Lear

We may feel a temptation to sneer,

We should never forget

That we owe him a debt

For his work as the first pioneer.

Devika produced a superb piece by Nissim Ezekiel, the Bombay poet who in a moment of light musing delivered a colloquial exchange between two friends, in the kind of quaint speech that is full of gauche Indian ways of using English, such as using ‘backside’ for ‘rear.’ Which reminds one of a famous limerick celebrating Sardar Baldev Singh, India’s first Defence Minister –

A visit to Lady Mountbatten

Found her ducks running round in the garden,

Baldev Singh then stated

His spirit elevated

How lovely your battakhs, so fattened!

Maya Angelou, not known for her comedic verse, was selected by Priya. She came in a costume wearing a trendy hat and carrying a basket of wool, mimicking Mrs. Ruth Anning (not a character in Virginia Woolf's novel which we read, Mrs Dalloway) but instead, the protagonist of Woolf's short story titled Together and Apart, which is set at one of Clarissa Dalloway's parties. Her poem was about a dauntless woman whom nothing frightens –

Panthers in the park

Strangers in the dark

No, they don't frighten me at all.

Saras took up a Cat poem of T.S Eliot that features the Pekes and the Pollicles – pollicies being perhaps a kind of  terrier given to barking. The battle between the dogs is shown in this video on YouTube, the The Battle of Pekes and the Pollicles. The ascending crescendo of cries overwhelms the neighbourhood in the battle:

Bark bark bark bark

Bark bark BARK BARK

Until you can hear them all over the Park.

Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles from Cats, the Musical

Th largest contribution to the estate of T.S. Eliot has accrued from the royalties of the famous musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cats, where a dramatic narrative is created around the poems in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot. It was first released as a full production in 1981 in London. To imagine it all began with T.S. Eliot writing funny little cat poems as gifts to his god-children by various friends! 

Eliot Letter to Tandy family at The British Library

It was a delightful evening of enjoyment, which started off with a high tea with fabulous snacks contributed by all the readers, entertained in Arundhaty’s home to her customary hospitality. 

Eats on Dec 6, 2025 at the KRG Humorous Poems session

Diligent Reader Exercises (DREs) for Humorous Poems KRG session on Dec 5, 2025

1. While everyone was excited by the phallic energy of Geetha’s poem Asparagus, there is a 2-word phrase in that poem borrowed from a 17th century satirist we have recited before at KRG. What is the phrase, and who is the satirist?

2. In Joe’s poem selection, Under the Drooping Willow Tree, from the collection by Auden of The Oxford Book Of Light Verse, three lines have been substituted. Which are the lines? To refresh your memory go to page 408 of the W.H. Auden book:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ex6Xv5WFUPCsohxN3BgzsBcCXlj6Lq7e/view?usp=sharing

3. On the subject of family planning in Devika’s professor of Indianisms, Joe recited a haiku in Hindi to the gathering. Can you select any other subject touched on in Ezekiel’s poem The Professor, (for example. aches and pains, world is changing, score a century, weight and consequence, backside, etc.) and make a 17-syllable haiku in the famous form 5-7-5 in 3 lines? Preferably humorous, possibly scandalous.

4. Edward Lear (whom Thomo recited) almost single-handedly created the humorous poetic form called the Limerick which is rhymed in 5 lines as AABBA and has an anapaestic structure:

Lines 1, 2, and 5 each contain three anapaests (three “ta-ta-DUM” units) and have three stressed syllables.

ta-ta-DUM | ta-ta-DUM | ta-ta-DUM

Lines 3 and 4 each contain two anapaests (two “ta-ta-DUM” units) and have two stressed syllables.

ta-ta-DUM | ta-ta-DUM

But limericks can vary from that strict form …

FIND a limerick (or write your own) on any ONE of the following cities: Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Delhi.

5. Saras read a cat poem of T.S. Eliot, who demonstrated how adept he is at rhyming – something he never did in his ‘serious’ works. For whom did T.S. Eliot write his poems on cats? Which cat is labelled the ‘Napoleon of Crime’?

(Solutions are given at the end of the Consolidated Poems)