The Boston Girl
By Anita Diamant
Published 2014
Read April 2026
Addie Baum, at eighty-five, is asked by her granddaughter to explain how she became the woman she is. Thus starts the tale of Addie Baum, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who came to Boston from “what must be Russia now”. Her father had come with their two daughters, Betty and Celia in about 1896. Her mother came about 3 years later. Addie was born in Boston and lived her entire life there.
Addie jumps into her story in 1915 when she was fifteen. It chronicles her family’s struggles with living in this new country and concentrates on her teens and early twenties. While the family no longer lived in a small abode with dirt floors and no running water, they had to deal with financial difficulties and an extremely different culture.
The book is essentially a coming-of-age story for Addie. We learn much about her late adolescence and early adulthood as her sister Betty leaves the household to take a job and live in a boarding house and her sister Celia gets married. Celia’s departure requires Addie to leave school and find work so that the family can pay the rent and buy food. Despite first her family’s strictness and then the burden of working, Addie finds a way to pay for stays at the Rockport Lodge a (real!) a tourist house founded in 1906 to provide chaperoned holidays for Boston young women of limited means. Here Addie makes life-long friends that support her and each other through various tragedies that befall them. We cheer for Addie as she too leaves her parents’ home to live in a boardinghouse and ventures through a series of jobs while always contributing substantially to her parents’ expenses.
Coming of age stories are not as interesting to this reader as they once were, which is not surprising given this reader’s stage of life. However, this reader found this book quite engaging as Addie’s teen and young adult years occur about the same time as this reader’s two grandmothers. This reader finally learned as a retiree that her maternal grandmother (born 1911) was forced to leave school at age 16, in this case to take care of the family after her mother died in childbirth. After her father remarried somewhat hastily, this grandmother married to get out of the household and took one of her siblings to live with them. That knowledge helped explain her adamant declaration that this reader not entertain involvement with men until this reader had at least her master’s degree! This reader learned that all of this grandmother’s siblings were farmed out to various family members at the demand of the new wife. This reader’s paternal grandmother (born 1911) also did not complete high school and left home to marry a farmer’s son who lived across the field from her family’s farm. Neither grandfather farmed full-time, but did both did part-time, and made most of their living otherwise. Both grandmothers worked in factories during WWII but returned homemaking after the war. So, this reader’s grandmothers from rural communities followed a more “standard” path of not leaving home until they became wives and mothers and stayed in the workplace for only a relatively short period of their married life.
Addie’s story was more influenced by being in a city. Her family was dependent on wages to buy food, clothing, and shelter vs a rural life that allows much of the family’s food being raised in their gardens, chicken coops, and the like. While Addie’s parents wanted their daughters to contribute monetarily to the family, they didn’t want them leaving home until they married. Both Betty and Addie made use of boarding houses for single women that were available in Boston at that time despite their mother’s objections and corresponding verbal abuse.
This reader was given pause by this book about whether and when children become interested in their parents’ lives before they had children. In this book, it’s not a daughter asking Addie about her life, but a granddaughter and her school assignment. This reader did have some conversations with her mother about her youth, all of them occurring only once this reader was retired. Interestingly, many areas were left unexplored, the barriers to these areas neither acknowledged nor broken. The environment to discuss the past with grandparents may be easier, as the narrator suggests.
This was a nicely engaging book for this reader. Learning about Boston and its culture during this time period was fascinating: multiple immigrant populations who brought a diversity of religious and secular practices; the role of newspapers and other periodicals as the “social media” device as well as a source of news; the rapidly changing mores in the city and in the country; and the impact of war and a pandemic. While Addie’s parents apparently didn’t venture beyond their own immigrant population and its mores much, Addie and members of her generation did and did so through the local “Saturday Club”, at Rockport Lodge, and their workplaces. Although the author deftly lets us know about Boston culture of the time, the story is grounded in themes of family, friendship, courtship, marriage, mother/daughter conflict, and maturation of a young woman balancing many stresses. This book will be a rich source of discussion for many book groups.
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