The book is about a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early 20th century.

Six-year-old David Schearl has a close and loving relationship with his mother Genya but his father Albert is aloof, resentful and angry toward his wife and son.

David's development takes place between fear of his father's potential violence and the degradation of life in the streets of the tenement slums.

After the family has begun settling into their life in New York, Genya's sister Bertha arrives from Austrian Galicia (today Western Ukraine) to stay with them.

Listening to conversations between Genya and Bertha, David begins to pick up hints that his mother may have had an affair with a non-Jewish man in Galicia before marrying Albert.

During the Passover holiday, David encounters some older truant children who force him to accompany them and drop a piece of zinc onto a live trolley-car rail.

David, accompanying his father one day, sees Albert brutally whip a man who attempts to steal some of the milk bottles, possibly killing him.

He goes to Reb Yidel and fabricates a story, telling him that Genya is actually his aunt, his true mother is dead and that he is the son of her affair with the non-Jewish man.

This time, he touches the third rail with a long milk dipper in an attempt to create light and receives an enormous electric shock.

In 1960, The American Scholar, the literary quarterly of Phi Beta Kappa society, published a piece titled "The most neglected books of the past 25 years".

It is a work of high art, written with the full resources of modernism, which subtly interweaves an account of the worlds of the city gutter and the tenement cellar with a story of the overwhelming love between a mother and son.