Roosevelt, New Jersey: Big Dreams in a Small Town and What Time Did to Them

Whether you count its birth date as 1934 or 1936 (dreams have vague beginnings), Roosevelt, New Jersey, began as a vision of a cooperative village where immigrant tailors from Poland or Russia were expected to work part-time in a cooperative garment factory and part-time on co-op-managed farms. Twelve hundred and fifty acres in the flat meadowlands of New Jersey were the site of the made village called Jersey Homesteads, the town that was to become Roosevelt, and that in time grew away from the utopian dream of Benjamin Brown to become the stetl of a newer generation of writers, artists, musicians, plumbers, carpenters, and just second-generation Americans. This book is the story of that young-old village; the journal of Benjamin Brown’s early dream, of the coming of Ben Shahn to a hamlet school to paint a mural and then settle down in the heart of the place to become its most famous and in many ways most influential citizen. And the story is told by a man who has also been part of the history of that town, and who brings to what he has seen, and what he has heard of what he did not see, the unfailing eye of a great artist together with the ear and rhythm of a distinguished novelist, which together place his book squarely in the tradition of Akenfield and Division Street, U.S.A.