In My Father's Bakery [Hardcover]

Marvin Korman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2006

A remembrance of a neighborhood with all vignettes radiating from a bakery.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

This tale of Bronx life circa the '30s and '40s teems with wonderful characters striving to bring order and meaning into their often-chaotic lives. The author came of age in an extended secular Jewish family dependent on his father's bakery. His father's struggles to make the bakery a success resulted in interesting encounters, such as that with a venal Communist labor boss who threatened to ruin the bakery if the father failed to reduce bread prices. Korman limns affectionate portraits of family members, especially his mentally challenged uncle, Maxie, who could sell only one product in the bakery but who found the courage to stand up to a bully. Korman reminds modern readers how Jewish baseball star Hank Greenberg granted every American Jewish boy a sense of dignity. Other indelible personalities include the Presbyterian minister Leslie Turner, who played a vital role in spiriting a Korman family relative out of Nazi Germany. A well-told piece of American ethnic history. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Back Cover

"I grew up in the Bronx and used to go to a bakery like this. I used to know people like this. And do you want to know something? It was great being with them again."
---Regis Philbin

"Marvin Korman takes his riotous, Giants-loving, savvy Bronx family and with enormous skill, makes them universal. He is a Master Baker of a writer."
---Patricia Volk, author of Stuffed

"I love In My Father's Bakery=BEparticularly Korman's very personal account of the impact that Hank Greenberg had on Jewish kids in the Bronx."
---Lawrence Ritter, author of The Glory of Their Times

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Red Rock Press (February 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971437246
• ISBN-13: 978-0971437241
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,444,186 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A poignant and well told reminiscence of a bronx boyhood., May 25, 2004

By 

Earl S. Roberts (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In My Father's Bakery (Hardcover)

I recently finished this wonderful book and it is sitting by my wife's bedside waiting for her to get to it. Each of the stories has a plot of sorts and they are simply told and arranged with great skill. They are basically stories about the characters that inhabited the author's youth and the Bronx bakery owned by his family. The stories concern the family and employees who worked in the bakery, the customers, suppliers and locals whom the author observed while doing his homework in the bakery's back room. Through these characters, the author has successfully made the bakery itself and the life that swirled around it into a living "character."

On the most basic level, the book will have a nostalgic appeal to New Yorkers who grew up in similar neighborhoods during the later 1930s and 1940s. To the nostalgic reader of today this book will recapture what they recall to have been a quieter and more innocent time, but, the high level of the story telling insures that other readers will appreciate the internal and external struggles that the characters lived through during times of depression and war. The book is graceful, often poignant, and good humored throughout, and for about a week it sent me off to slumberland with a satisfied smile on my face.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An engagingly told autobiographical remembrance, November 16, 2003

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In My Father's Bakery (Hardcover)

In My Father's Bakery: A Bronx Memoir by Marvin Korman is a relaxed, impressionable memoir of the Depression and war years, focusing on the lives of a family of individuals, their friends, and their neighbors. Korman reveals just what it was like to grow up in a Jewish family, personally discover the ups and downs of life, and a great deal more. An engagingly told autobiographical remembrance with full tribute to the hardworking souls that persevered at their jobs day in, day out, In My Father's Bakery is welcome and rewarding reading.