This is both a portrait of a memorable character and a paean to New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Mazie Phillips-Gordon was a real person: by day a proprietor of a cinema, by night she roamed the streets helping the homeless with money for food, bars of soap and sips from her brandy flask during the Great Depression. An unorthodox Jew, her humanitarian side developed from her unlikely friendship with a Catholic nun, Sr Tee. Attenberg re-creates the remarkable Mazie and her world by means of an intricate narrative technique – mainly Mazie’s fictional diary combined with accounts from acquaintances and even a few extracts from her unpublished memoir – also fictional. This inventive technique keeps the action moving at a lively pace. Most memorable are Mazie’s passionate, compassionate, non self-pitying voice and her love for her native streets: “These streets are dirty, but they’re home, and they’re beautiful to me. If you can’t see the beauty in the dirt, then I feel sorry for you.”
