Friday, Sept 23 7pm
A-Space 4722 Baltimore ave, west phily
free- donations for travel appreciated
Loisaida is at once a coming-of-age story, a family saga, and a tale of urban politics. Catherine, a young anarchist estranged from her parents and squatting in an abandoned building on New York’s Lower East Side is fighting with her boyfriend and conflicted about her work on an underground newspaper. After learning of a developer's plans to demolish a community garden, Catherine builds an alliance with a group of Puerto Rican community activists. Together they confront the confluence of politics, money, and real estate that rule Manhattan. All the while she learns important lessons from her great-grandmother's life in the Yiddish anarchist movement that flourished on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century.
In her journey through the abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and gentrified townhouses that constitute the city-scape of Loisaida (the hispanisization of Lower East Side) she encounters squatters, community organizers, drug dealers, politicians, and poets. Her odyssey reveals both the potential for transformation that exists at the margins of society, and the possibilities for growth and change that reside within her as well. Chodorkoff, who co-founded the internationally known Institute for Social Ecology, brings a socio-ecological perspective to his descriptions of the Lower East Side and the neighborhood itself emerges as a character.
Two- time National Book Award finalist Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and What was Left the Daughter has offered praise for Chodorkoff's work: "Loisaida brings mid-twentieth century life in New York to readers with cinematic immediacy. Dan Chodorkoff's remarkable ear for eavesdropping in on what Grace Paley called 'cosmic dialogue of the streets', and the way his sociological astuteness is present on every page, makes for an inimitable debut novel. Chodorkoff's characters are- with all of their passionate politics, erotic craziness, unpredictable despair and joy, their big appetites for life- indispensable. Wonderfully animating the fundamental eccentricity of life, and, page by page, full of passionate erudition, Loisaida is indeed a powerful reading experience."
About Dan Chodorkoff
Dan Chodorkoff is a writer who co-founded The Institute for Social Ecology. He received his PH.D in cultural anthropology from the New School for Social Research . His research focused on grassroots community development efforts on the Lower East Side, where he worked for twelve years. A former college professor, his writing has been translated into five languages and appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. He is a life-long activist currently living in Northern Vermont with his wife and two daughters where he gardens, writes, plays harmonica, and works on environmental justice issues. Loisaida is his first novel.
