Our 2024 Summer Reading List

Find your next beach read at the Tenement Museum Shop! From Mott Street by Ava Chin to James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, check out what we’re reading this summer and get 25% off your order with code SUMMER.

Miriam’s Kitchen: A Memoir
Elizabeth Ehrlich

Like many Jewish Americans, Elizabeth Ehrlich was ambivalent about her background. She identified with Jewish cultural attitudes, but not with the institutions; she had fond memories of her Jewish grandmothers, but she found their religious practices irrelevant to her life. It wasn’t until she entered the kitchen–and world–of her mother-in-law, Miriam, a Holocaust survivor, that Ehrlich began to understand the importance of preserving the traditions of the past.

$24.00 ($18.00 with code SUMMER)

97 Orchard Street
An Edible History of Five Families in One New York Tenement
Jane Ziegelman

In 97 Orchard, Jane Ziegelman explores the culinary life that was the heart and soul of New York’s Lower East Side around the turn of the twentieth century—a city within a city, where Germans, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews attempted to forge a new life. Through the experiences of five families, all of them residents of 97 Orchard Street, Ziegelman takes readers on a vivid and unforgettable tour.

$14.99 ($11.24 with code SUMMER)

Low Life
Lucy Sante

Lucy Sante’s Low Life is a portrait of America’s greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent story of the city’s slums and teeming streets, scenes of innumerable cons and crimes. Low Life is more than simply a book about New York. It’s one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written.

$20.00 ($15.00 with code SUMMER)

Up in the Old Hotel
Joseph Mitchell

Saloon-keepers and street preachers, Romani and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books — McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould’s Secret — all in one.

$22.00 ($16.50 with code SUMMER)

Mott Street
A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming
Ava Chin

A sweeping narrative history of the Chinese Exclusion Act through an intimate portrayal of one family’s epic journey to lay down roots in America.

As the only child of a single mother in Queens, Ava Chin found her family’s origins to be shrouded in mystery. She had never met her father, and her grandparents’ stories didn’t match the history she read at school. Mott Street traces Chin’s quest to understand her Chinese American family’s story.

$18.00 ($13.50 with code SUMMER)

Stitching a Life: An Immigration Story
Mary Helen Fein

It’s 1900, and sixteen-year-old Helen comes alone in steerage across the Atlantic from a small village in Lithuania, fleeing terrible anti-Semitism and persecution. She arrives at Ellis Island, and finds a place to live in the colorful Lower East Side of New York.

$19.99 ($14.99 with code SUMMER)

Up from Orchard Street
Eleanor Widmer

Three generations of Roths live together in a crowded tenement flat at number 12. Long-widowed Manya is the family’s head and its heart: mother of dapper Jack, mother-in-law of frail and beautiful Lil, and adored bubby of Elka and Willy. Money may have been short but opinions were not, and their tart tongues and lively humor invest every page. In this riveting story lies the heart of the American immigrant experience: a novel at once wise, funny, poignant, anguishing, exultant and bursting with love.

$19.99 ($14.99 with code SUMMER)

Wrestling With Moses
Anthony Flint

To a young Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Village, with its winding cobblestone streets and diverse makeup, was everything a city neighborhood should be. But consummate power broker Robert Moses, the father of many of New York’s most monumental development projects, thought neighborhoods like Greenwich Village were badly in need of “urban renewal.” The rivalry of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, a struggle for the soul of a city, is one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern American history.

$18.00 ($13.50 with code SUMMER)

Legends of the Chelsea Hotel
Living with Artists and Outlaws in New York’s Rebel Mecca
Ed Hamilton

There’s a current that courses through the old Chelsea Hotel, an electricity that drives people relentlessly to create. It’s an energy that longtime resident Ed Hamilton will tell you often drives inhabitants to madness. In a series of linked cyanide capsules, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel tells the odd, funny, and often tragic truth of the writers, artists, and musicians — the famous and the obscure alike — who have fallen prey to the Chelsea.

$29.99 ($22.49 with code SUMMER)

Manhattan Mafia Guide
Hits, Homes, & Headquarters
Eric Ferrara

Before any codes of honor were established in the New World, violent bosses wreaked havoc on their communities in their quest to rule the underworld. It took several decades for the Mafia to mature into a contemporary organized crime syndicate. Some names and places from both eras are still infamous today, like Frank Costello and the Copacabana, while some have remained hidden in absolute secrecy… until now.

$22.99 ($17.24 with code SUMMER)

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
James McBride

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

$28.00 ($21.00 with code SUMMER)