My Suburban Shtetl
A Novel About Life in a Twentieth-Century Jewish-American Village by Robert Rand This is a humourous story about growing up in Skokie(a suburb of Chicago) in the 60s and 70s. The narrator in this story is called Bobby Bakalchuk, and the first name being the same as the author's, it gives the reader the impression that the story is true. A lot of the incidents in the story do have a lot of truth in them; the Nazis did march in Skokie, and as told in this book, the citizens of Skokie did try to stop them, although not by hitting them with salami. Integration was something that the citizens of Skokie opposed, although I don't know how much was actually as portrayed in this book. I suspect that this book would be enjoyed more by someone with more familiarity with Skokie's actual history.
Happy reading.
