Loisaida

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. She learns important lessons from her great-grandmother's tales of life in the Yiddish anarchist movement that flourished on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century.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. In this coming of age story, family saga, and political thriller, which two time National Book Award finalist Howard Norman calls an "inimitable debut novel", author Daniel Chodorkoff explores Bloch's "principle of hope", and examines how memory and imagination inform social change.