A Walker in the City

Ditching college class one day, I went to the local public library, plucked a random book from the shelf and found that it was "A Walker in the City." I knew nothing about Kazin and didn't especially enjoy memoir, but I took the book home. There, Kazin drew me in, one page after another into the world of Brownsville, and the dreams of the world beyond. I could relate to his need to describe it all, to leave not one stone unturned in his cataloging of vivid memory. I have since bought and given away several copies of this memoir. It is a gem, and each time I read it is only slightly less delightful than the last.

Alfred Kazin's eminently readable memoir of his childhood and adolescent life growing up in a Jewish enclave in New York City during the early decades of the twentieth century, offer certain insight into the realities of the cityscape but most enjoyably his personality. The first lines - 'Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away' - are not mere platitudes, but rather establish the style of the book and the indelible connection between the author and the city. Kazin at times meanders with his storytelling and rememberances of the textures of the city, of Brownsville and it's inhabitants, but like any good writer who has developed a truly authentic voice, he redraws the reader into the narrative, into himself. And for Kazin - and vicariously for the reader - the city, his experiences of Brownsville, and the inhabitants are bound into a seamless whole. Kazin seems at his best when he parrots the coyly yearning adolescent male. I couldn't help but smile at one particular scene in which he described an older, married, and forlorn woman, who's mysticism piqued his youthful interest. 'How did you address your shameful secret love when she walked into a kitchen, and sat down with you, and smiled, smiled nervously, never fitting herself to the great design?' the sly youth pondered, for in his imagination, which Leo Tolstoy too inhabited, she was his Anna. This scene was one of several anecdotes that I found myself smiling at as I read, enjoying the author's wit, prose, and storytelling ability. If one reads for the love of language and for the imagination, this book will not disappoint.

In the 1940s, Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) revisited his Brooklyn childhood in the short yet elegant memoir, A WALKER IN THE CITY. It is a stunning literary work, with the added bonus of getting a rare close-up view of a particular culture in a particular time and place that might otherwise be lost in oblivion. The culture is the Yiddish enclave of the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, circa 1920s and the coming of the Great Depression. To the young boy, it was the entire planet, one that throbbed with the food, language and traditions of old world immigrants who want their children to preserve their ways but avail American education. The neighborhood's minorities include the Italian peddlers, the gentile school principal, and the African American population that is beginning to settle at the edges, on Livonia Avenue. It is a time of change: in the streets there are Zionist, Socialist, Communist, and union proclamations. Young women are bewildering their elders with their independence and new thoughts on marriage. As Kazin grows older, he begins to experience "the beyond" as well: the world brought in by films and literature, the wonders of "the city" (Manhattan), the mysteries of the human condition. The telling of his story is golden. It's as if Kazin is a cinematographer, his prose growing more colorful as he slips from a walk in the present back into memory. He plays to all the senses with vivid imagery. His rhythmic prose is effortlessly lyrical. So precise is his description, that when I looked up a map of Brooklyn, the streets he named are all exactly where he laid them out in my mind.

This book without a doubt is the best book I have read ever.Its clear and simple english make it a breath of freshairto read.Lets just look at one sentence:"Everytime I go back to brownsville its as if I had neverbeen away"

One of the most respected literary critics this country has produced, Kazin made a significant contribution to the literature of the American immigrant with "Walker in the City." This demanding autobiography of his youth in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn vividly recreates the life of pre-Depression and Depression Jews for whom Manhattan, though just miles away, represented a faraway land filled with mystery and fear.It is the world outside of Brownsville that looms over the book and the spirit of its narrator. Kazin successfully captures the yearning for new experiences that filled his heart as he grew up in the streets. It was that yearning that led him to the public library and ultimately across the bridges and out of the Brooklyn borough. It was also that yearning that made him wonder about a world that was not filled with Jews.The mystery of the lands that lay beyond Brownsville's streets fills the book with a sense of tension. We can almost feel the young Kazin's heart burst as he begins to sense the vastness of the world. "Beyond! Beyond!" the narrator shouts, and prose turns into poetry in many passages of the book as he seeks to express the mixture of fear and exhiliration stirring within him.One chapter, "The Kitchen," has been frequently anthologized, and rightfully so. It is a meditation on the room in which his mother spent much of her time working on the sewing she took in to make extra money. In the end, his mother's constant pounding on the foot treadle of the sewing machine comes to the author to represent the fire burning within her -- to achieve, to make a better life for her son, to survive in a strange new land where this exiled Jewish woman is once again a stranger.This is a great book that deserves a vast readership. Though not a novel, it takes its place next to "The Rise of David Levinsky" and "Call It Sleep" as a masterpiece of immigrant and Jewish/American literature.