NEW YORK - In 1920s Williamsburg, a Brooklyn boy named Meyer Silovitz loses his younger brother in an instant, and with him, the warmth of the only home he had ever known. What follows is not a story of revenge or ruin, but of a child learning to survive on his own terms: one shoeshine, one nickel, one small act of dignity at a time.
The Shoeshine Box, the debut novel by SS Ettinger, is available now.
Spanning the tenements of Brooklyn, the shine stands of the subway, the sunlit hotels of Miami, and the music-soaked streets of pre-Castro Havana, the novel follows Meyer as he grows into the man who will call himself Jack.
He is shaped less by luck than by the people who take the time to notice him, chief among them Meyer Lewis, a quietly powerful mentor who sees in a shoeshine boy something the boy cannot yet see in himself.
At its heart, The Shoeshine Box is a book about what we carry. Ettinger writes with restraint and a deep tenderness for a vanished New York, letting grief, loyalty, ambition, and the long shadow of a mother's blame unfold without sentimentality.
The result is intimate, unhurried, and humorous from time to time, with an ending that quietly reframes everything before it.
"If you borrow something, you return it in better condition than you found it," Meyer tells his little brother early in the book, a rule that comes to govern the rest of his life.
Readers of literary and historical fiction will find a story that lingers long after the final page: a portrait of resilience, chosen family, and the distance a person can travel from where they began.
The Shoeshine Box by SS Ettinger is available now in paperback, hardcover, and eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Google Books, Ingram, and Lulu.
SS Ettinger.
Contact: ssmiloff@gmail.com
Instagram/Fb: @ssettinger
