Reading Response On The Stories Of My Boyhood By Stanley Yokell

Stories of My Boyhood is a memoir by Stanley Yokell, a retired engineer who lives in Colorado. This short book covers the period in Yokell’s life from his birth in Brooklyn, New York in 1922, until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, an event which prompted the author to enlist in the navy and which he identifies as marking the end of his boyhood. Yokell’s account is of a childhood spent in Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century. This is not a rags-to-riches tale by any stretch. While the author’s family was certainly not wealthy, his father owned his own linen business and was thus able to provide a comfortable life for his family, one which included regular holidays and a Steinway grand piano in the dining room. Yokell shares his memories of schools, neighborhoods, family members, pets, and historical events. He does so with almost total recall, remembering names, places, and incidents in remarkable detail. With a Latvian-born father and a mother born in Manhattan to Eastern European parents, Yokell is able to describe what it was like for Jewish immigrants making a life for themselves in the United States. This was at a time, remember, when race relations were difficult, to put it mildly.

I enjoyed this book because it is more than just one man’s reminiscence. It is also a social history of a particular time and place long since gone. Yokell gives us an eyewitness account from a period when parts of Brooklyn could still be described as rural. It was a time when the author could ride his bike down to the nearby airfield, climb over the chain-link fence, and hitch a ride on a two-seater plane to Newark airport. The writer also discusses national issues and figures. As someone not from the United States, I found the passages on Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Franklin D. Roosevelt particularly educational. I was also interested to learn that ‘American Firsters’ had appeared in the 1930s, long before Donald Trump came along and adopted a very similar political ideology.

I liked the author’s style of writing. He uses short, unadorned sentences which provide clarity of meaning and which bring the events and people he describes into sharp focus. This makes the book’s lack of effective editing all the more disappointing. The text is littered with spelling mistakes, omitted words, lack of commas, and other inconsistencies. I stopped counting the errors by the end of chapter one, by which point the tally had gone into double figures.

Lack of editing is apparent in other places too. The book does not provide a chronological narrative of the author’s youth. Instead, the writer provides us with discrete chapters, each of which deals with a particular aspect of his life, and each of which moves backward and forwards in time. This keeps the narrative focused, but it does lead to some confusion with the timeline of the book. It also results in a degree of repetition, as some tales fall naturally into more than one category. The author’s dogs Beauty and Whitey, for example, die once in the chapter on dogs, before repeating the performance in the section dealing with death. This kind of repetition occurs several times, leaving one with the impression of a collection of articles or short stories that have been bundled together, without further amendment, and issued as a book.

There are some sexual references in the book, plus one or two mild profanities. There is also the short chapter on death which contains graphic descriptions of fatal accidents. These things taken together may mean that this book is unsuitable for younger people. Readers who enjoy memoirs or social histories will undoubtedly enjoy this one. I certainly did, but I can still only award it two out of four stars. I am taking away one star for the many grammatical errors present in the book, and a second for the various repetitions I found.