Outside/Inside

Outside/Inside: Growing up in the Great Depression is a memoir looking back at an impoverished childhood in the South Bronx slums during the Great Depression years of the 1930s. Don Croton, born in 1925, describes with bitterness but with gallows humor the survival strategies of a family of seven children, a mother’s life-long sorrows when her Orthodox Jewish parents sit shivah (the ritual for the dead) when she marries an English Protestant, and a father’s guilt as he futilely searches for work to put “eats on the table”. This memoir is not just the story of one family in the stark days of the Great Depression. Its experience is framed by the author, an economist, year by year against the background of President Hoover’s failed policies and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the preface the author sees more than a personal reason for telling his story: “…since the United States may continue on the brink of another Great Depression or a long-term Recession, this witness from one of the last survivors of the Great Depression of the 1930s might serve as a warning about the enduring damage caused by the poison of poverty, and an urgent plea for bold initiatives to avoid more pain.”