Maxwell Street is an open-air market on Chicago's West Side, the center of a ghetto about a mile square, where thousands of Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms and persecution in Eastern Europe settled and first set up business in America between 1880 and 1924. This engrossing, lively and richly illustrated chronicle recreates the color, the diversity and the personality of Maxwell Street both through the author's recollections of his own childhood experience and the actual stories of many for whom Maxwell Street was the first taste of America.