"Union Square" 1933 HALPER, Albert

HALPER, Albert

[378] pp.

The Literary Guild New York

1933

8 1/2" x 5 3/4"

DOWN where Broadway crosses Fourteenth Street, New York’s ghetto has a little garden suburb known as Union Square. Its soap boxes and open-air forums are the city’s safety valve, a rude reminder to patrician Stuyvesant Square that three blocks below are sweatshops and hunger and below-sidewalk retreats where Revolution is plotted ceaselessly,

Mr. Halper, a new writer, has adapted for his book the familiar formula revitalized by Vicki Baum in Grand Hotel. It radiates from a cheap walk-up apartment, '20 Door City.’ It’s all about the People, and third floor-back drinkers and lovers; and always the Party, a parade of disillusioned immigres. ’Why don’t you go back where you come from?’ some shillalah bearer from the Old Sod is forever taunting them. And in the ensuing riots that both sides somehow seem to welcome, Mr. Halper tells us, ‘in all the husky beefsteak faces [of the cops] the red juice of life and fury was overflowing, and the communists got spattered with the gravy.’ An unpleasant story, much of it; but it rings true.