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| May 05, 2024 |
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General News: Author to Speak About Newburgh in the '50s
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| A 1950s scene of Broadway from a mural by Albert Nemethy. |
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| Genie Abrams will speak at the Cornwall Public Library on Sunday. |
September 16, 2010
Newburgh author Genie Abrams remembers vividly the city of Newburgh of her youth. Broadway was bustling with shoppers who came from out of town to visit the city’s sophisticated stores and bring home some delicious food from the Jewish delis nearby. Newburgh was a mecca – and a place where Abrams played freely on the streets surrounding her home on Farrington Street.
Abrams, whose father was the city manager, moved away in 1963 and the image that she had of her childhood home was shattered when she returned to finish work on a novel set in Newburgh. “It was like east Beirut,” Abrams said in a recent interview. “I went into shock.”
Despite the hard edges of her former urban home, Abrams found traces of the life she once lived here in the 1950s – the worn letters of Etti’s Deli or the Sons of Israel of Williams Street. But more than physical reminders, Abrams said she found the motivation to finish her novel, Louey Levy’s Greatest Catch.
“It always stayed in my heart,” Abrams recalled, as she described how she needed to immerse herself in the city once again to finish the novel, loosely based on her own experiences as a young girl growing up “I started to write this story about events that happened when I was a little child and I felt like could do a better job finishing it if I was submerged in the city.”
Abrams moved back to the city of Newburgh with her husband in 2000 and settled into a house with a river view. She will be reading from her novel this Sunday, September 19th at the Crawford House on Montgomery Street, where she will be joined by her friend, city historian Mary McTamaney, who also grew up in Newburgh and has seen the city go through joyful and sorrowful times.
McTamaney will bring some photos of Newburgh taken back in the 1950s and Abrams promises that there will be plenty of opportunity for people to ask question and reminisce.
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