A Review

Sheffield Sketches: Chicago stories of the 1940s

By Fred E. Schwartz

Baybury Books, 2010

For so many of us, our most indelible memories are those we have of our childhood homes and neighborhoods. The people and places of our earliest years have a way of imprinting on us, and these geographies often play a central role in who we ultimately become as adults. At the core of each of us, there is a place stuck in time.

For Fred Schwartz, this frozen moment was the Sheffield neighborhood of Chicago in the 1940s. It was a working class neighborhood made up of regular families. Corner taverns and groceries provided central points for community interaction. The noise of clattering el trains echoed in the background. The cinema matinees provided the primary respite from the days’ realities. And of course, there was the war. The Second World War hung like an ever-present cloud over everyone and everything. Apart from all the predictable changes that time has brought between then and now, perhaps the most notable is that war, and the way we live with our wars today. In the 1940s, the war may have been elsewhere, but still it was difficult to forget it, even for a moment. There was rationing, there were the social changes caused by the demands of war-time production and the absence of so many men, there was much doing without and, of course, much sacrifice and much death. Today the wars we wage are almost unnoticeable for most of us. In the ‘40s there was a real home front and the reality and misery of the war was palpable. Then, the war impacted everyone.

In Sheffield Stories, Schwartz brings this neighborhood and this moment in time back to life in a series of short fictional sketches, some of which previously appeared here in the Peninsula Pulse. Typically these stories portray ordinary people and incidents in their everyday experiences in life. At times they risk bordering on the quaint, but Schwartz often brings the stories around to end in an odd twist or unexpected coincidence. These quick plot turns are a way of showing that even for the most ordinary and average people we meet in life, things are not always as they appear, and life does not always lead where we expect it will – sometimes for the better, sometimes not. With circumstances and characters that seem to conceal very little, Schwartz always finds a way to reveal a bit of mystery.

An interesting note that was only just revealed to me by the author’s son is that Schwartz himself sometimes turns up in his own stories. While it always seemed unlikely that the characters were cut from whole cloth, and while we knew that many of the settings of the stories were a matter of fact rather than fiction, it turns out that some of stories do not cleave far at all from the author’s actual boyhood experience. For example, in the story “Bread Upon the Water,” the neighborhood paperboy receives a small landscape painting as a gift at Christmas. The customer who gave him the gift had been a struggling artist, but had recently achieved some success in his work. I was told that the author treasured that painting through his life.

While each sketch of Sheffield Stories stands alone, they are linked to each other with common setting, an interwoven cast of characters and occasionally with overlapping story lines. This method of collecting miniatures presents a panoramic view of the neighborhood that is revealed only as each of the pieces is fit with the others. Eventually a complete narrative emerges as a string of tiny polished gems and it is an heirloom to be treasured.

Sheffield Sketches: Chicago stories of the 1940s is available at The Peninsula Bookman in Fish Creek.