"The Contract with God Trilogy"

"All day the rain poured down on the Bronx without mercy.
The sewers overflowed and the waters rose over the curbs of the street.
The tenement at Nº 55 Dropsie Avenue seemed ready to rise and float away on the swirling tide. "Like the ark of Noah", it seemed to Frimme Hersh as he sloshed homeward.
Only the tears of ten thousand weeping angels could cause such a deluge ! And, come to think of it, maybe that is exactly what it was...
           ... after all, this was the day Frimme Hersh buried Rachele, his daughter."

*

"After the crash of the stock market in 1929, a Great Depression engulfed western society like a grey cloud ! Suddenly it seemed to a world which had been in gleeful pursuit of the good life, that living had become survival !

Many hitherto unquestioned assumptions now came under reexamination."