My reading and enjoyment of Teju Cole's novel Open City last spring inspired me to reread A Walker in the City because I thought I saw similarities in the two. Cole's meditative story about an immigrant doctor in residence wandering New York City reflecting on what he sees and the rich brew of thoughts it all brings to mind reminded me of Kazin's memoir because that's how I remembered it. I was surprised to discover it's not quite that way. As a boy Kazin did explore and wander a bit. To say it was the compulsive directionless walking of a deeply introspective man is to misrepresent it.Kazin became introspective, of course. He became one of our foremost intellectual minds. During the course of his memoir, though, he's a boy. Instead of encompassing the entire city, Kazin's focus is more local: the subway, the synagogue, and the kitchen. It's a memoir of a boyhood spent in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, at the time a Jewish neighborhood with much Old World flavor. There is movement in the book. The man Kazin became rides the subway to step into the pool of nostalgia he finds in his old neighborhood. From that penetration the focus expands outward to remember how the boy's curiosity and increasing awareness encouraged him to move into newer environments. The synagogue and the busy family kitchen are early centers of life. As he grows his world broadens to the block and to nearby streets. The last section is indeed a walk, to Highland Park where he stands on the edge of the wider world, ready to leave Brownsville.This is very much a memoir of what it was like to grow up in a section of the city dominated by Jewish families and their way of life so reminiscent of Europe. Kazin vividly records it all. In his beautifully modulated prose, one of the hallmarks of Kazin's oeuvre, he remembers the even spacing of horse dung in the street, the regular pat of a ball bouncing against a wall, all the sights and food smells of clamoring businesses and play around him recorded as rhythmically as a boy's steps on a sidewalk. He carefully makes the distinction between American and Jewish cultures. Standing within Brownsville and its protective Jewish atmosphere, the outside was American. It's intensely nostalgic for him, the remembered arc of learning and growth from child to boy on the cusp of manhood ready to make those first steps into an academic life and away from Brownsville forever. As we know, Kazin's journey was one of significant literary importance. In A Walker in the City, the opening volume of an autobiographical trilogy, he revisits the beginning of that journey to record how the first boyhood steps in the synagogue, the kitchen, and the street gave direction to the man he became.
Every New Yorker has her own map of things as they were, things as they have become. In his memoir, the critic Alfred Kazin gives us is - the insular Bronzeville, Brooklyn neighborhood of the twenties and thirties, when Jewish immigrants discussed socialism and longed to join the "all right-niks" on Eastern Parkway. It's common to praise memoirs for being "without nostalgia or sentimentality" - but such a thing is rarely possible. This book is bathed in both, but to beautiful effect, giving us a window onto one of the city's many lost worlds - long gone even as Kazin is writing over 60 years ago - a welcome antidote to the latest article that talks about Brooklyn being "discovered" ten years ago or some such.
What do You think about A Walker In The City (1969)?
A WALKER IN THE CITY, is a kind of sensory tour Kazin's childhood in Brownsville, NYC. It begins, "Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away. From the moment I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue and smell the leak out of the men's room, then the pickles from the stand just below the subway steps, an instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness... As I walk those familiarly choked streets at dusk and see the old women sitting in front of the tenements, past and present become each other's faces; I am back where I began." This book is on my TOP 10 list. Highly recommended.
—Karima
This book was an extraordinary read. The author reminisces over his childhood growing up in a poor Jewish community on the outskirts of New York: he then goes much deeper touching questions that we ask ourselves (or have ever asked ourselves) as teenagers/young adults grasping to understand our various identities and their place in this industrialized enigma. It is about finding your place in the world and making peace with the one that has passed. Alfred Kazin speaks to our conscience through his own.
—Dave
Nostalgia gone wild!Four autobiographical essays of life as a young Jewis boy living in New York City from 1920's - 1930's."From the Subway to the Synagogue"-I was the first American child - All teachers were to be respected like gods - blue collar workers (painters) - the delicatessen - the movie theatre - the synagogue with the people from the same European village"The Kitchen"Jewishness - the Sabbath - and his mother"The Block and Beyond"pick-up softball in the streets - travels outside of the neighborhood, trolleys, Brooklyn Bridge, Metropolitan Museum of Art"Summer: The Way to Highland Park"
—Deedee
