Fay Webern was born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents on the Lower East Side of NYC in 1927 and grew up living at the Lavanburg Homes, the first experimental utopian housing communities for low-income families in America. Her stories capture the struggle, the heart and the humor of a poor and tightly knit community living through the Great Depression, and continue into the 1950’s as the postwar arts scene in NYC, which Fay was part of, blossomed.
Fay writes about her mother, descended from Russian Socialist revolutionaries, who did everything from chicken-plucking to peanut-peddling to keep the family going, and her father, a garment worker paid by the piece with four children to feed.
Fay’s Lower East Side includes her friend the Chinese laundryman, his girlfriend who lived in one of the dilapidated yard-houses behind the cold-water flats among the wash lines and alley cats, the Gypsy neighborhood and the Gypsy October festivals where Jews bought wild Concord grapes for their Passover wines, the huge chicken market inside a post of the Williamsburg bridge, the whole neighborhood street dances every Friday night, the Election Night fires, the fabulous back room of the candy store across the street where children sat with the poker-playing racketeers after school to bring them luck, and to wait for the pennies they got when they were sent to retrieve anyone receiving a phone call on the one neighborhood phone that resided in the back of the candy store.
As Fay grows up she recounts stories of the burgeoning art scene, where artists were all being influenced by the new sounds of Jazz and the freedom of Modern Dance and where a painter from The Art Students League made a portrait of Fay at the age of 16 after seeing her dance, titling it “Spirit of Defiance”.
Fay spent most of her adult life in publishing, rising from copy editor to copy chief at Scientific American, to senior editor of The Encyclopedia Brittanica’s yearbook on new medical developments and college textbooks.
When Fay retired in the late 1990’s she studied “truth through art” non-fiction writing at the Gotham Writers Workshop. Her teacher was Tyler C. Gore, listed several times as a Notable Essayist by The Best American Essays annual anthology and who is the editor of Literal Latte, the online literary journal based in NYC.
Fay’s beloved teacher and mentor found her Lower East Side stories so impressive that she soon became a regular reader at the very popular nightclub,The Knitting Factory, which used to be located near the World Trade Center. After the destruction of the area on 9/11 Fay, who is lame due to a previous dance injury and lived downtown, had difficulty navigating the city streets. She moved to Vermont in 2002.
When you hear Fay read from her book in her own voice…you will be transported to a Lower East Side that will never be again. Fay is still the embodiment of the Spirit of Defiance, and she will inspire everyone who hears her story.