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(More customer reviews)Harriet Levy was born in San Francisco in 1867 and lived at 920 O'Farrell Street until about 1904. Readers who are familiar with the sights and sounds of San Francisco will be equally pleased with the unfamiliar: "Near the corner of Polk Street stood the cow barn of old man Waller, to which the anemic children of the neighborhood, glass in hand, hurried in the early morning hours to receive warm milk fresh from the cow." About one-third of the chapters are named for rooms of her house. The rooms are described in great detail only to flow into some memory of an event that occurred there. For instance, before reminiscing about her sister Addie's beautiful singing voice and the songs she sang, Levy describes the room itself: "...the ceiling of the music room a lattice of bamboo intertwined with garlands of tea roses and autumn leaves, and burnished birds of copper and blue winging their flight..." Levy's vivid descriptions put you right there. Familiar names also pop up, like Alice Toklas who was a friend and neighbor. This book is a treasure.
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Originally published in 1937 in the later years of her extraordinary life, Harriet Lane Levy's memoirs of her childhood in San Francisco during the late 1800s give us a rare view into the traditional life and manners of an upper-middle-class Jewish family of the era.With sly wit and a writing style critics compared to Jane Austen's, Levy vividly portrays an often stifling world of parlors and sitting rooms, maids and cooks, family intrigue and neighborhood pretensions, eased by the warmth of family affections and Levy's own independent spirit.It was her unique sense of self that enabled Levy to break away from this quiet, comfortable, almost ritualistically bourgeois existence and go on from 920 O'Farrell to lead a rather unconventional life. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley at a time when very few women went to college, and wrote for The Wave, along with Frank Norris and Jack London. She then moved to Paris with Alice B. Toklas and became an intimate of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Matisse, and other leaders of the modern art movement.Written long after the familiar city of her youth had disappeared with the 1906 earthquake, these rich and thoughtful reminiscences reveal a Victorian world of surface formalities and underlying urgency.
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