Literary Nonfiction. Jewish Studies. THE BUTTON THIEF OF EAST 14TH STREET: SCENES FROM A LIFE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE 1927-1957 is Fay Webern's masterful chronicle of a youth spent in one of New York City's most vibrant immigrant communities during the harsh years of the Great Depression and The Second World War. Its forty-two beautifully sculpted episodes t only conjure into vivid existence a complete world, but reveal something of the bedrock of the author's inner being, in which the irreducible hardness, the 'is'-ness, of reality may be felt: the burden of survival; the 'stone in the heart'; the daily concerns, serious or frivolous, erected on it; and at the same time, always, flying above, indomitable, the muse of poetic imagination and the 'spirit of defiance. THE BUTTON THIEF is a joyous, magnificent achievement an extraordinarily truthful and moving work of art, both radically personal and universal, utterly transcending the category of memoir.