Rarely has a writer managed to portray the relationship between mother and daughter in such a human, vital, and honest way as Gornik did in this masterpiece, which was first published in 1987. A mature woman walks with her elderly mother through the streets of Manhattan. Through these walks, full of memories, complaints, and shared humor, the author recounts her struggle as a daughter to find her place in the world. At the same time, Gornik relives her childhood experiences in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, when she lived with her family in a building populated by working-class Jews. At the heart of the book are the relationships between the neighbors: the female communal space created each morning when the block of buildings empties of the men who go to work, and the women and girls remain in their own kingdom, centered on the tangled clotheslines that tie them together and turn into a knot that is difficult to untie. This is not only a story about a mother and daughter, but also a story of female coming of age and initiation. The instructive female figures for whom the narrator Oren grows up are her mother – a strong working-class woman, a secret socialist activist, and also a loving mother and partner – and their neighbor Nettie, a stranger living among Jews, a woman of loss whose overt sexuality condemned her to a constant stay on the margins of society. These female models will shape the narrator’s soul and dictate her relationships with patriarchal society, with her work, and with other women for the rest of her life. Before us is the story of a delicate and exhausting relationship, but also a moving portrait of a society, of an era, and a brilliant and sensitive analysis of humanity and the slightly murky materials of which it is composed. “Although it never seemed like my mother was listening to what was happening in the alley, nothing escaped her. She heard every sound, every movement of the clotheslines, every sweat of the linens, and absorbed every reading and every communication. We would joke about the one's broken English, and the other's big mouth and frivolity, a shriek here, a juicy curse there. Her lively reactions and comments on what was happening outside the window allowed me to taste for the first time the fruits of her intelligence: she knew how to convert gossip into knowledge."