In the summer of 1911, a motherless fourteen-year-old farm girl, responsible for house sweeping, toilet cleaning, cooking, darning, dish washing, clothes washing, and room cleaning for four older brothers and an abusive father makes her escape. She travels alone to Philadelphia where she becomes "The Help" for a wealthy Jewish family. Joan Skraggs is impetuous, smart, and deeply curious about the world. Joan's diary entries serve as our insight as she struggles to understand her first exposures to erudition, Judaism,
kashrut, parental expectations and encouragement, mainstream Catholicism, anti-Semitism, love, and simply growing up. The book won a Newberry Medal and Jewish book awards and plays heavily on literature that would be familiar to early teenage girls that love to read. Think Louisa May Alcott. I, of course, was way out of my element. Nevertheless,
The Hired Girl focuses a lens on young adult fiction as well as the lives of German Jews working as hard as they could to become assimilated Americans at the start of the twentieth century.
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