NONFICTION - Jan. 7, 1996

STREETS: A Memoir of the Lower East Side by Bella Spewack (Feminist Press: $19.95; 216 pp.) Bella Cohen Spewack and her husband and collaborator, Sam, enjoyed success with Hollywood movie scripts and Broadway plays (among their hits: “Kiss Me, Kate” and “My Three Angels”), but she never forgot her childhood in New York City’s turn-of-the-century slums. When she died in 1990 at age 91, the executors of her estate found this unpublished memoir. It was written in 1922, after Spewack had graduated from high school--a major accomplishment in those days for an impoverished Hungarian Jewish immigrant girl--and begun to write for newspapers. It looks back on hardship with only a few hints of the triumphs to follow.

Spewack’s father abandoned the family in Europe. Her stepfather did the same in America. Her mother, Fanny, worked as a servant and seamstress, took in boarders and begged charities for help. Her beloved half-brother, Herschey, died of a wasting disease. To escape a life of drudgery in the tenements, Spewack called on her gumption, acting ability and wit, as well as on the literary gifts that we see developing in “Streets.” Terse, unpretentious, mature in outlook, it features good dialogue and telling physical detail. It also gives us an idea of how the immigrant experience has changed, for better and worse--no welfare then, fewer guns, more effective public schools--and how it has remained the same.