Any book about a young girl growing up in a poor immigrant neighborhood in a large city sometime in the early part of the last century faces comparison to Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and usually suffers for it. Ronna Wineberg’s first novel, On Bittersweet Place, is no exception.
The best and most powerful sections of On Bittersweet Place are the ones that concern Lena’s parents, Reesa and Chaim (aka Henry), who were brought together in an arranged marriage and whose loyalty to each other is frequently at odds with a fundamental difference in temperaments and the scars of their shared history: while he went ahead to America to earn money to bring the rest of the family over and fell in love with a beautiful, gentle, and Gentile woman, she was left behind with the children in Belilovka to face a war and a devastating pogrom. Even filtered through Lena’s limited and subjective first-person narration (she vastly prefers her charming father), their pain, anger, and guilt is compelling. Maybe On Bittersweet Place‘s greatest flaw is that their marriage is more interesting than Lena’s rather predictable coming of age.
By Ronna Wineberg
