Human Erosion in Harlem:
BARACH, GLORIA
Human Erosion in Harlem Come Back on Monday. ?? Sheila Solomon Klass. Abelard Schuman. 252 pages. $3.95. Reviewed by Gloria Barach Free-lamce editor and reviewer of contemporary fiction For...
...Wong, who dared to teach her hygiene class the proper methods for removing lice...
...Bleakness is here, of course, but there is humor, too...
...Mrs...
...The humor bubbles up in the children—sometimes ironic and barbed, sometimes wildly incredible, but human and hopeful...
...Sheila Klass was a schoolteacher in Harlem for seven years before she wrote this book...
...And love, now as distorted as hatred, may win out some day against the tide of prejudice...
...Ruby, the beautiful Negro girl who is looking for a way to live decently in a world of slime...
...Come Back on Monday is a terrifying chronicle of the human erosion in a Harlem school...
...There is also Mr...
...But as Sheila Klass well knows, money cannot patch the wounds of the soul...
...Deborah is stunned by the accusation...
...Yet the accusation works its poison and Deborah begins to doubt her heart...
...Perhaps the newspaper is right...
...Driven and hounded from childhood —by Hitler, by her rigid Orthodox family, by the European-born conscience in her American-trained mind —Deborah finds the greatest joy in her life in teaching...
...It should also be required reading for all of us who have let the fat ring of complacency encircle our hearts, for all of us who are afraid to open our minds to the poignant cries of these children...
...and Mrs...
...Money has been paid to the exterminator for eliminating the rats that roam school corridors, to the plumber for a new flush toilet...
...What she does offer is tremendous insight in a story of great narrative power...
...Yet, Mrs...
...Klass offers no easy solution to Deborah's problem—or to those of her colleagues, mean and generous alike...
...Perhaps she really does hate these people or—almost as bad—does not love them enough...
...It is a compassionate and honest investigation into the dark and frightened core of the human conscience...
...It is a condemnation of those who would offer simple solutions and those who do not care enough to offer any...
...From her experiences there she has distilled the memorable people of this probing novel...
...It should be required reading for every teacher and teacher-to-be in the American school system...
...Wright, the prissy Negro schoolteacher, who thinks corridor discipline is more important than education...
...Once he was a small boy in velvet pants with a mother who thought she gave him everything when she taught him manners...
...There is Marcus, the collegeeducated Negro who masks his hatred for whites with his glib tongue...
...But all her joy evaporates when she becomes the focal point of a newspaper story which accuses her of being antiNegro...
...Consumed by ambition, deaf to the cries for help that surround her, Sybil works hard—at keeping her school quiet so that she may obtain a transfer to a better school...
...the fat, unfeeling school principal...
...For the present, we have Come Back on Monday...
...But mostly this is the story of Deborah Lieb, a sensitive Jewish girl...
...Klass' novel is not a sociological tract or a case history...
...she has worked with them and for them, given them her time and her thought...
...Reviewed by Gloria Barach Free-lamce editor and reviewer of contemporary fiction For too many years the secret ingredient in American optimism has heen money: money to patch the chipping plaster, to shore up the crumbling Avails, to buy new and impressive equipment for our public schools...
...She loves these children...
...There is Sybil Knox...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 3
