Samuel G. Freedman’s mother died of breast cancer at the age of 50, when he was in college. He gave the eulogy at her funeral, but did not visit her grave again until another family member died 26 years later, in 2000. He seems to have tried to avoid even thinking about her.

His father’s family was colorful and romantic: They were politically engaged anarchists, radicals, and communists. Their stories thrilled him. His matrilineal line, by contrast, was a conventional, presumably ordinary, Bronx family that had struggled from dire poverty to bare respectability. Seeing her evoked feelings of guilt, a recognition he had rejected her and her family.

When Mr. Freedman revisited his mother’s gravestone, he began to plumb his complicated feelings about his mother and to admit to himself that he did not know her. Freed of his adolescent anger, eager to recover what he had lost because of his rage, he decided to find out who she was. He wanted to know about her family, her friends, her neighborhood, her aspirations, her disappointments, her loves. He wanted to see her as a person who had a life before she became his mother.

To this project, Mr. Freedman brings the tools of a veteran journalist and careful historian. He has succeeded brilliantly in finding out who his mother was and how she lived; the result is a book that is deeply satisfying to read, as close to time traveling as most of us will ever experience.

“Who She Was” (Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $25) takes the reader into a lost world, the world of Depression-era poverty as experienced by Jewish immigrants in the Bronx. Without sentimentality or fantasy, without relying on fictional techniques, Mr. Freedman carefully constructs a neighborhood and a way of life that is now forgotten. Reading his book is akin to touring a historical exhibit on “Jewish Life in the East Bronx, 1930-45” – only far more fun, as it is a gripping narrative peopled with living characters.

To write this account of his mother, Eleanor Hatkin, Mr. Freedman interviewed her brother and sister, her high school friends, and far-flung relatives. He examined photographs, diaries, letters, oral histories, and other artifacts of the long-gone era. He studied census records and immigration records, reviewed archival film footage, and retrieved transcripts from Morris High School and City College. He even located the Social Security records for his mother and grandfather, giving him an accurate account of the family income during the Depression and World War II.

The result of this journalistic voyage of discovery is not a dry reprise of Eleanor’s life. On the contrary, the book reads like a novel, one that reflects the texture of daily life in vivid detail. You can see the dark apartment in the six story tenement at 1461 Boston Road in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, where Eleanor and her sister Fannie shared a single daybed “in the parlor that tripled for living, dining, and sleeping,” while their younger brother Sol slept in a cot in his parents’ bedroom.

The family was desperately poor. Eleanor’s father, Sol, a native of Latvia, did piecework for shoe factories as a stitcher. He was frequently laid off because he was too slow or work was scarce. In 1937 Sol earned $1,300 working for the elite I. Miller & Sons Company, but in all of 1938, he made only $682.99 – just $180 more than the family’s annual rent.

Electric appliances were a luxury beyond the reach of the Hatkin family. Eleanor’s mother, Rose, bought stale bread to save pennies and scavenged for bruised vegetables from the market garbage. Rose had two overriding goals in her life: To keep the family free of the humiliation of receiving government relief and to save enough money to bring her family – especially her favorite sister – from Europe to America. She achieved her first goal, but not – to her great and lifelong despair – the second.

The book opens with Eleanor Hatkin’s first day at Morris High School. She was an academic star, admitted to the Goodwin School, the honors program. In Mr. Freedman’s description of the elegant school, its faculty, and its curriculum, the reader encounters the New York City public school system at the height of its glory, offering academic excellence, expectations of personal character, and visions of glory to its impoverished immigrant students.

The school fed the students’ “ferocious aspiration fed of penury,” promising them “the way out of walkups and sweatshops, out of watching your mother faint because she hadn’t eaten in two days and your father trudge home from the relief office with boots and a shovel for his job clearing snow.” Eleanor finished Morris as the highest-ranking graduate in her class. She was the family’s star. Everyone expected great things of her, and she expected great things of herself. She enrolled in college, but could afford to attend only part-time, as she had to work to help support the family.

Although Eleanor was a rebel at heart, she accepted her responsibility to supplement the family income. Eventually she found a good full-time job in an electronics factory, enjoying a measure of financial independence and helping her family move to a better neighborhood in the Bronx. But to work full-time, she became a part-time student, abandoning her academic dreams.

In her quest for independence and freedom from the stultifying confines of her home life, Eleanor had many boyfriends. One was serious but had the handicap of being Catholic. When they announced their plans to marry, mother Rose threatened to kill herself; that was the end of the romance.

Eleanor never forgave her mother for standing in the way of her happiness. Soon afterward, she married an aspiring podiatrist who met Rose’s religious criterion. She supported him through graduate school and also won her college degree, but the marriage was a disaster. Even before the marriage was annulled (a legal necessity in New York, where divorce was not easily obtained), Eleanor met Dave Freeman and quickly resolved to marry him. Eleanor married with a profound sense of relief, writes her son and first-born, because Dave was “her ticket out,” her escape from a bad marriage, from the Bronx, and from her mother’s stifling grip.

Samuel Freedman did indeed find his mother, did bring her to life and find out how she lived, the choices and mistakes she made. His journalistic and historical search has brought him a measure of peace. His readers can only admire the way he has unearthed the lost world of his mother and wish we all could know our parents and grandparents as he has come to know his.

Ms. Ravitch is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.