By the Waters of Manhattan (Masterworks of Modern Jewish Writing Series) [Paperback]

Charles Reznikoff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1986 | ISBN-10: 091012955X | ISBN-13: 978-0910129558 | Edition: 1ST

This is the first novel of Charles Reznikoff, one of the outstanding American poets of this century. It tells the story of a courageous woman in Russia who emigrates to America and starts a family and business in New York's Lower East Side. Her son, a young poet, opens a bookstore in bohemian Greenwich Village. Into his shop one day comes a beautiful upper-class girl, and the two are immediately drawn to one another.

Editorial Reviews

Review

I am thrilled with it. This book has so much in it that marks Reznikoff as a first-rate artist. --William Carlos Williams

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) writes prose like a poet, indeed he is one,
with his rock-hard choice of words styled into deceptively simple sentences.
Deceptive because when juxtaposed, each sentence accelerating into the next,
they relay condensed lives, jammed with emotion, kin, and striving. Lopate's tender
and eloquent introduction sets the record straight for this under-acknowledged literary
master: '...the shocks of fortune laid out and the aftershocks allowed to register in the
reader's mind, with no attempt to milk emotion.' --Betsy Sussler, BOMB magazine

Mr. Reznikoff's work is remarkable and original in American literature.... He has written the first story of the Jewish immigrant that is not false. --Lionel Trilling --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Markus Wiener Pub; 1ST edition (December 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 091012955X
• ISBN-13: 978-0910129558
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,830,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poor Jewish schtetl to garment-worker NYC by master poet., July 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: By the Waters of Manhattan (Masterworks of Modern Jewish Writing Series) (Paperback)

First published in 1930 in New York, autodidact poet Charles Reznikoff -- associated w/the Objectivist circle of poets around Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen -- set this movingly beautiful novel in two parts: the first half based on his mother's childhood & youth in pogrom-infested, practically medieval pre-revolutionary peasant Russia -- Sarah Yedda's bitterly poor childhood as a smart, determined Jewish girl limited by means convention & family trauma, the young woman's brave solo move to America, hard life in New York as a garment worker & marriage to another emigrant worker. The novel's second half narrates a few months in the days of talented & alienated young man of 21 who haunts New York's Carnegie libraries. Sarah Yedda's son Ezekiel makes a break from the family home, opening a tiny bookstore on faith ignorance & credit, getting wrapped up in romance exciting & frustrating . Reznikoff's light-handed, subtle take works for both cases: chronicling the lost past & delivering up the new....No sentimentalism, simple & affecting.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Poet's Rare Novel of the Immigrant Experience, February 19, 2009

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: By the Waters of Manhattan (A Black Sparrow Book) (Paperback)

Charles Reznikoff (1894 -- 1976) was one of the founders of objectivist poetry. Spare. restrained, and understated, Reznikoff's poetry is at its best when it describes New York City and its loneliness. Reznikoff's poetry retains a small group of devoted readers. John Martin and Black Sparrow Press did the great service of republishing Reznikoff's poems and other writings which might otherwise have been forgotten.

Reznikoff's novels, unhappily, are even more obscure than his poems. Reznikoff's first novel "By the Waters of Manhattan" (1930) was the first of his writings to be commercially published. (The early volumes of poetry were self-published.)The book received critical acclaim but failed commercially. It was republished in 1986 with an introduction by Milton Hindus,a Reznikoff scholar, and has recently appeared in this new edition from the successor of John Martin's Black Sparrow Press.

The novel is made by its style which shares many of the qualities of Reznikoff's poetry. The writing is simple, direct, and restrained. The writing shows a close eye for places, people, and emotion; but it does not shout. The story is told in a sober, chaste manner in which the voice and opinions of the author seem virtually absent. The reader is left to bring feeling and understanding to the written word.

Roughly the first half of the book takes place in old Russia before the 20th Century. Although the story involves a large and poor extended Jewish family, it has two primary characters: Ezekiel Volsky and his daughter Sarah Yetta. Ezekiel wanders from town to town trying to support his family through various jobs. Intelligent and agressive, Sarah Yetta longs for an education which is denied her. She becomes the mainstay of the family when she learns to sew and, as an adolescent, takes on several young girls as employees. She cannot accept the suitors or matches that are offered to her because she feels she does not respect the young men. When her father Exekiel dies, the family discovered his lengthy manuscripts of poetry written in Hebrew --- doubtless explaining why he was at best an indifferent success in supporting his family. His wife Hannah burns the poems for fear that they contain radical political views. As she does so, she observes ""Here's a man's life." Soon thereafter, Sarah Yetta leaves her family to emmigrate to the United States. This first part of the novel is slow but it describes life in Czarist Russia in a measured, dispassionate tone without special pleading, histrionics, or judgment.

The second section of the book deals with immigrant life in New York City. It basically has two parts. Its immediate focus is Sarah Yetta as she tries to succeed in her new life. Reznikoff shows her in the large, unhealthy tenements boarding with relatives and in many sweatshops seeking work as a seamstress. He offers a detailed, unsentimentalized portrayal of life on the Lower East Side. Sarah Yetta meets a cousin from Russia, Saul, who is two years younger than herself and marries him.

In the last part of the book, the focus shifts to Saul and Sarah Yetta's son, Ezekiel, named after his grandfather. The couple are in their 40s but broken and bent from their lives in the sweatshops. They have two young daughters to support in addition to their grown son. Exekiel is a young man of 21 who spends his days reading but does not know how to support himself. He leases a small basement store from a grocer and manages to open a bookstore, selling, at first, what today would be the equivalent of remainders. One of his first customers is an elegant, well-to-do and lovely young woman named Jane Dauthendey who, Ezekiel learns, is part Jewish. The couple slowly become involved, but their story is left unresolved at the end of the novel. As was his grandfather, Ezekiel is torn in the story between the need to support himself and his desire for art and the life of the mind. Reznikoff offers beautifully realistic pictures of Ezekiel's torment, as well as of the streets, bridges, automats, gaslights, parks,storefronts, and tenements of old New York. Born in the United States, Ezekiel is an alientated, drifting young man. His life brings disappointment to the hopes of Sarah Yetta and Ezekiel. "We are a lost generation", Sarah Yetta observes, "It is for our children to do what they can."

In his review of "By the Waters of Manhattan", the critic Lionel Trilling noted that by virtue of the simplicity and clarity of his language and expression, Reznikoff had "written the first story of the Jewish immigrant that is not false." The story is told in an unsentimenal manner without the political preaching that often marred similar works by Reznikoff's contemporaries or by earlier writers. The restrained, subtle nature of this novel is not of the type that will appeal to a mass of readers. But in its understated, poetic eloquence, this is a novel that describes faithfully New York City and its early East European immigrants. The novel deserves to be read and remembered.

Robin Friedman

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pictures of immigrant life done with restraint, February 5, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: By the Waters of Manhattan (Masterworks of Modern Jewish Writing Series) (Paperback)

This family chronicle in three parts has a kind of quiet power. The story moves from provincial Russia at the turn of the century, to the land of immigration, America, and has its last section depicting life in lower Manhattan in the 1920's. Reznikoff draws clear portraits of his parents, and tells the story of their business partnership with his more adventurous uncle.

He writes with a kind of restraint and sureness. And there is somehow a dignity and aesthetic composure in the picture he makes of this world now long gone.