In Betty Smith’s description of the tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), also known as the “ghetto palm,” the tree is contrasted with the memory of a school poem that evoked the “forest primeval” with its “murmuring pines and hemlocks.” For Smith, writing in the early 1940s, the presence of this tree was a marker, or even harbinger, of neighbourhood decline. The tree of heaven se…
In this story the author makes clear the sinking of the English fishing schooners by the Baltic fleet of Russia and brings in all kinds of events that seemed hallucinations when the story appeared serially, but which have since come true in startling manner.