The Little Girl Who Helped Beat the Nazis

Childhood Remembered: Reviewing Betty Smith’s ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’

Francie loves to read. She remembers when her eyes fell on a word and, for the first time ever, it meant something. She’d been learning all her letters, their sounds, and how they fit together. Then one day “mouse” jumped off the page—and “horse” and “running” and countless more. “From that time on,” recounts the narrator in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows i…