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A Walker in the City

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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.

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.

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.

A stunningly beautiful, poetic snapshot of Jewish New York roughly mid-20th century, with some counter-intuitive surprises. Brought me into the world of my parents and grandparents; it is also useful as a sort of emic ethnologue of sorts for Jewish immigrant life in this period.

I bought this book as a companion piece for EB White's "Here is New York," which I was planning to reread. It was published nearly contemporaneously but offered a more parochial view of the city - and one based largely in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan. I also was looking to get my fix of beautiful, descriptive writing that focuses on place, which has been a recent obsession. It filled all of those expectations wonderfully.

On the other hand, even at fewer than two hundred pages, I found myself missing plot. The book is reflection meets physical description meets intellectual coming-of-age. There is a teasingly minute amount of other coming-of-age content, but not much. All of that can get a little dense, especially in the last half of the third and entire fourth (and final) sections of the book.

I recommend it. The writing is spectacularly observant. However, the sentences do go on a bit and twist and turn in ways that required rereading. Next time I take it on, I think it will be in chunks, with a little more time to savor - and to read something heavy in plot in between.

I bought A Walker in the City when the New York Times did a retrospective review of the book. I could not wait to read it, for stylistic reasons as much as for content and was not disappointed on either count. For any New Yorker of the past 50 years, this book will be a nostalogic journey full of recognition and surprises. I am not a New Yorker but I am a devotee of Law and Order and you can imagine my delight when Detectives Lennie Bricoe and Ed Green had to make a visit to Canarsie - the writer's neighborhood.

New York City and Jewish life in the 1920s and 1930s are evoked with great affection with a touch of the bittersweet. The mood is a passionate ode to the past, and the prose is energetic and muscular. You feel you are walking the city with the writer. In the memories of famly life and the Sabbath meal, you can smell the food, feel the warmth of the kitchen and the Mother's love. A great memoir, travel guide into the past and a "how to" on how to write.

A Walker in the City seems like a book that I should like. Critically acclaimed and lauded, i expected it would be wonderful. Granted, Kazin has a way with words and description unlike most, however, "A Walker" simply bored me. Reading it in comparison to McCourts Angela's Ashes for a college course, I can't help but wish Kazin had resisted the temptation to describe everything in detail and tell us more about the people. He ends the book talking about a romantic relationship, yet tells nothing of the girl, simply the reservoir and park in which they walked. I can't help but almost be angry that he seems to have no value for human relationships, he rather bury his nose in a book or stare at a brick wall on the street. I see this book as missing the mark, having potential and good qualities but overall being an overdramatic, over-emotional boring description of his emotions and surroundings. "give me a break"

I first read A WALKER IN THE CITY as an adolescent, and the book impressed me, in that mysterious way that things that we know "should" impress us can do.

I re-read WALKER as an adult and, by modern standards, I think that it is overrated.

It is long and rambling and self-indulgent.

By rights, A WALKER IN THE CITY should have resonated for me, since my own father had grown up in Brownsville, exactly the same neighborhood that author Alfred Kazin describes, and at virtually the same time.

Yet I found little about Brownsville in this dreary memoir; it simply explores the rather maudlin sentiments of the young Kazin. Swifty Lazar, the late literary agent who was renowned for representing men of letters, as opposed to being a man of letters himself, had offered a far more compelling description of life in that same Brownsville in his own memoir.

No, WALKER only is about Kazin and his adolescent imagination, his theories about those who lived in places other than Brownsville (to wit, "the city") and about his personal (and intensely idiosynchratic, if not peculiar) yearnings.

There are points in which he uses Yiddish without offering a translation, and even a section in which he lapses into high-school French, again with no translation. His use of language often seems strained and self-conscious, such as using the word "plash" as--I think--a synonym for "splash."

Insofar as much of the book had been printed in contemporary magazines as essays, the format here has cobbled together several essays into a memoir. In consequence, this memoir could have used better editing, since things that are fully explained on their first mention do not need the identical explanations further into the book; such styling would be reasonable in a series of magazine pieces, but not in a volume offered as a cohesive work.

I cannot help wondering whether A WALKER IN THE CITY, first published in 1946, would be as enthusiastically received if it first saw print today. It strikes me as the literary equivalent of the Emperor's new clothes.

This book without a doubt is the best book I have read ever.
Its clear and simple english make it a breath of freshair
to read.

Lets just look at one sentence:
"Everytime I go back to brownsville its as if I had never
been away"