A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 995educatIon in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Education is at the center of A Tree Grows in Brook-
lyn. On the first page, 11-year-old Francie Nolan
recalls the “fine feeling” she has in school when
reciting Longfellow’s Evangeline; in the book’s final
pages, at the age of 16 1/2, she is excitedly prepar-
ing to go off to study at the University of Michigan.
Francie’s destiny as a student is set on the day she
is born, when her maternal grandmother tells her
mother that she must read to the child a page a day
from the Bible and from Shakespeare. “The reading
and the writing,” Grandmother Rommely insists,
will enable Francie to live in “a different world” from
that of her ancestors.
The world into which Francie is born is one
of “hunger and hardship.” Her parents and grand-
parents struggled to stay alive, both in the old
countries—Ireland and Austria—and in the United
States. Young girls married and had numerous chil-
dren before they were 30; men were either charm-
ingly reckless or brutally cruel. Francie’s mother,
Katie, fears that this is an endless “cycle.” But Mary
Rommely, herself uneducated and illiterate, believes
in the promise of America: “In the old country, a
man is given to the past. Here he belongs to the
future.” And the way into that future, she is con-
vinced, is education.
One poignant incident that strikingly shows the
value of education is the delivery of Aunt Sissy’s
first healthy baby. Pregnant for the 11th time—
after 10 stillbirths—she decides to give birth in
a hospital where she will have a Jewish doctor in
attendance—because “everybody” knows that Jew-
ish doctors “are smarter.” The family is shocked, but
Sissy’s baby lives, simply because he is administered
oxygen at the crucial moment. What is a miracle to
Sissy is routine for the doctor. Education, we see,
can be a giver of life, and lack of education can lead
to missed opportunities and exploitation: Grand-
mother Rommelly, for example, loses 10 years’
savings when she is duped into buying a worthless
deed to a piece of land that “had not been the man’s
to sell.”
The day Francie learns to read is given a short
chapter of its own: “Oh, magic hour when a child
first knows it can read printed words!” From that
moment, Francie knows she will never be alone, and
she vows to read “one book a day” for the rest of
her life. Francie is a reader; she feels as good in the
public library as in church, and she fantasizes that
when she grows up her home will have little more
than “books . . . books . . . books . . .” As a lonely
child, she looks to school for “companionship” and
for the stabilizing routines that give her a feeling of
“safety” and “community.” Although the reality of
school in an immigrant ghetto is often brutalizing
and cruel, Francie remains entranced by “the magic
of learning things.”
When Francie is 14 and close to graduating
from grammar school, her aunts recommend that
her mother send her out to work, for the family is
desperate for money. Katie is reluctant because she
wants her daughter to complete at least this part of
her education. A kindly saloon keeper intervenes;
he invents a light cleaning job for Francie and her
brother that allows them both to stay in school.
After she graduates, Francie is faced with another
challenge. She wants to go to high school, but her
mother needs one of the children to work; and
although Francie wants to attend school “more’n I’ll
ever want anything in my life,” Katie decides that
Neeley will be the one to go. Although she is deeply
wounded by her mother’s decision, Francie manages
to find a way to study even while working; without
ever enrolling in high school, she takes summer col-
lege courses and passes the regents’ college entrance
examinations.
The novel does not show us what happens to
Francie after she gets her formal education, but by
ending in the way it does, it suggests that, indeed,
the world is all before her. She has escaped from
the cycle of poverty that had engulfed her family,
and, while she will never forget her origins, she will
be able to transcend them. This is, ultimately, the
American dream, made possible by education.
Joyce ZonanaSex and SexuaLIty in A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn
Sexuality—what Betty Smith calls “fierce love hun-
ger”—runs as a deep, strong current throughout A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Its power is presented
explicitly and without sentimentality, its healthy
expression celebrated, its hypocritical repression