A Walker in the City

Alfred Kazin

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780156941761
• eBook ISBN: 9780547546360
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A literary icon's "singular and beautiful" memoir of growing up as a first-generation Jewish American in Brownsville, Brooklyn ( The New Yorker).
 
A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new.
 
With vivid imagery and sensual detail—the smell of half-sour pickles, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses—Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this working-class community, and his eventual foray across the river to "the city," the mysterious, compelling Manhattan, where treasures like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum beckoned. Eventually, he would travel even farther, building a life around books and language and literature and exploring all that the world had to offer.
 
"The whole texture, color, and sound of life in this tenement realm . . . is revealed as tapestried, as dazzling, as full of lush and varied richness as an Arabian bazaar." — The New York Times

The Block and Beyond

THE OLD DRUGSTORE on our corner has been replaced by a second-hand furniture store; the old candy store has been replaced by a second-hand furniture store, the old bakery, the old hardware shop, the old “coffee pot” that was once reached over a dirt road. I was there the day they put a pavement in. That “coffee pot” was the first restaurant I ever sat in, trembling—they served ham and bacon there—over a swiss cheese on rye and coffee in a thick mug without a saucer as I watched the truck drivers kidding the heavily lipsticked girl behind the counter. The whole block is now thick with second-hand furniture stores. The fluttering red canvas signs BARGAINS BARGAINS reach up to the first-floor windows. At every step I have to fight maple love seats bulging out of the doors. It looks as if our old life has been turned out into the street, suddenly reminds me of the nude shamed look furniture on the street always had those terrible first winters of the depression, when we stood around each newly evicted family to give them comfort and the young Communists raged up and down the street calling for volunteers to put the furniture back and crying aloud with their fists lifted to the sky. But on the Chester Street side of the house I make out the letters we carefully pasted there in tar sometime in the fall of either 1924 or 1925:

DAZZY VANCE
WORLDS GREATEST PICHER
262 STRIKEOUTS
BROOKLYN NATIONAL LEAG
GIANTS STINK ON ICE
DAZZY DAZZY DAZZY

The old barbershop is still there. Once it was owned by two brothers, the younger one fat and greasy and with a waxed stiffly pointed mustache of which he was so proud that he put a photograph of himself in the window with the inscription: “MEN! LOOK AT OUR MUSTACHE AND LOOK AT YOURS!” The older one was dry and sad, the “conscientious” partner. The fat brother had an old fiddle he let me play in the shop when business was bad; he would sprawl in the first barber chair languidly admiring himself in the great mirrors, clicking his teeth over the nudes in the Police Gazette, and keep time for me by waving his razor. I never liked him very much; he was what we reproachfully called a “sport,” a loud and boastful man; he always smelled of hair lotion. You could see each hair as it ran off the crown of his head so sticky and twisted in lotion that it reflected the light from the bulbs in the ceiling. We were all a little afraid of him. One day he bought a motorcycle on credit, and as he started it from the curb, flew into the window of the delicatessen store. I remember the shiver of the glass as it instantaneously fell out all around him, and as he picked himself up, his face and hands streaming with blood, the sly little smile with which he pointed to the sausages and pickle pots in the street: “Hey you little bastards! Free treat!”

I see the barbershop through the steam from the hot towel fount. The vapor glistened on the unbelievable breasts of the calendar nudes pasted above the mirrors and on the fat bandaged chin of Peaches Browning every day in the News and on the great colored drawing all over the front page of the Graphic one morning showing Mrs. Ruth Snyder strapped and burning in the electric chair. The smell of hair tonic could never disguise the steaming exhalation of raw female flesh. Everything in that barbershop promised me a first look. On the table, along with the News and the Graphic, College Humor and the Police Gazette, lay several volumes of a pictorial history of the World War. I played the barber’s violin for him only because I could then get to sit over those volumes by the hour, lost in the gray photographs and drawings of men going into battle, ruined towns in Serbia, Belgium, and France where one chimney still rose from a house destroyed by shell fire, pictures of the victorious French in 1919 dipping their battle standards in the Rhine. There were two photographs I remember particularly: it was really for them that I went back and back to that barbershop. One showed a group of German officers in full uniform, with all their medals, standing outside a brothel in France with the ladies of the house, who were naked to the waist and wore crosses between their enormous breasts. The officers had their arms comfortably draped over the girls’ shoulders, and grinned into the camera. GERMAN KULTUR, ran the caption. HOW THE ENEMY AMUSES ITSELF BEHIND THE LINES. The other photograph showed Kaiser Wilhelm with his retinue, inspecting troops. The Kaiser and the generals were walking on wooden planks; the caption noted that the planks had been laid there to keep the distinguished company from walking in the blood that ran over the field.

The shoemaker is still there; the old laundry is now a printing shop. Next to it is the twin of our old house, connected with ours below the intervening stores by a long common cellar. As I look at the iron grillwork over the glass door, I think of the dark-faced girl who used to stand on that stoop night after night watching for her Italian boy friend. Her widowed mother, dressed always in black, a fat meek woman with a clubfoot, was so horrified by the affair that she went to the neighbors for help. The quarrels of mother and daughter could be heard all over the street. “How can you go around with an Italian? How can you think of it? You’re unnatural! You’re draining the blood straight from my heart!” Night after night she would sit at her window, watching the girl go off with her Italyéner—ominous word that contained all her fear of the Gentiles—and weep. The Italian boy was devoted to the daughter and wanted them to marry. Again and again he tried to persuade the mother, but she would lock the door on him and cry out from behind it in Yiddish: “I have harmed you and your family? I interfere with your customs? Go away and leave us be! Leave us be! A Jewish girl is not for you, Mister! Go away!” In desperation, he offered “to become a Jew.” No one had ever heard of such a thing, and the mother was so astonished that she gave her consent to the marriage. The boy was overjoyed—but waited until the last possible moment before the wedding to undergo circumcision, and as he walked tremblingly to the canopy, the blood dripping down his trouser legs, fainted dead away. The block never stopped talking about it.

Where now is my beautiful Mrs. Baruch, the “chicken lady,” who sat smack in the middle of her store on a bloody kitchen chair plucking and plucking the feathers off her chickens with such a raw hearty laugh that you could hear her a block away? I would stop in her doorway on my way back from school just to watch her work, for as she plucked, plucked the feathers off her chickens with one grimly impatient pull along her right elbow, she seemed instantaneously to draw out of their bellies a great coiling mass of intestines and blood vessels, and—never for a moment letting up in her unending hoarse cackle-scolded and gossiped with the women standing around her. Whenever she looked up and saw me standing in the doorway, she would hold up her hands in mock dismay, feathers sticking to each finger, and her hairy chin trembling with laughter, would call out—“Hey, student! My Alfred! Come give me a big kiss! Is all right! Your mother left here an hour ago!”

And where is Blumka, our local madwoman, who every Friday afternoon just before the Sabbath began, icy pale under her sleek black pompadour, made the rounds of the block dragging a child’s cart behind her and wearing a long satin dress? She often sat on the stoop of our house with her head resting against the glass in the door, gossiping with the neighbors or talking to herself, and never budged until the cart was heaped with charcoal, chicory, the long white Sabbath khalleh, and fruit. It was on our steps particularly that she liked to take her rest. Perhaps she enjoyed embarrassing us; perhaps, I used to think, she stopped there because she knew how much I loved watching her, for she would smile and smile at me with a fixed and shameless grin. Shameless was our word for her—a Jewish woman to beg in the streets! She had a brutal directness in the way she did everything—flopped around the streets all Friday long with her cart ignoring everyone with a dreamy contempt unless she wanted to talk; openly demanded her living of us; sat herself down on a stoop whenever she liked, mumbling to herself or jeering at the children; and when she liked, lay flat on the steps singing old Yiddish ditties to herself. Always in the same long black satin dress that came down to her high button shoes, always dragging that battered children’s cart behind her, she would sometimes lie there against the glass, her tightly coiled mass of dead-looking hair splitting the light where she lay, her long straight nose and fierce jaw jutting into the air with a kind of insolent defiance. She seemed always to be jeering, but it was hard to find out what she meant by it, for she said everything that came into her mind in the same gruff oddly disdainful tone of voice, her icy pale cheeks moving tensely up and down as she chewed at a piece of bread.

The block: my block. It was on the Chester Street side of our house, between the grocery and the back wall of the old drugstore, that I was hammered into the shape of the streets. Everything beginning at Blake Avenue would always wear for me some delightful strangeness and mildness, simply because it was not of my block, the block, where the clang of your head sounded against the pavement when you fell in a fist fight, and the rows of store-lights on each side were pitiless, watching you. Anything away from the block was good: even a school you never went to, two blocks away: there were vegetable gardens in the park across the street. Returning from “New York,” I would take the longest routes home from the subway, get off a station ahead of our own, only for the unexpectedness of walking through Betsy Head Park and hearing the gravel crunch under my feet as I went beyond the vegetable gardens, smelling the sweaty sweet dampness from the pool in summer and the dust on the leaves as I passed under the ailanthus trees. On the block itself everything rose up only to test me.

We worked every inch of it, from the cellars and the backyards to the sickening space between the roofs. Any wall, any stoop, any curving metal edge on a billboard sign made a place against which to knock a ball; any bottom rung of a fire escape ladder a goal in basketball; any sewer cover a base; any crack in the pavement a “net” for the tense sharp tennis that we played by beating a soft ball back and forth with our hands between the squares. Betsy Head Park two blocks away would always feel slightly foreign, for it belonged to the Amboys and the Bristols and the Hopkinsons as much as it did to us. Our life every day was fought out on the pavement and in the gutter, up against the walls of the houses and the glass fronts of the drugstore and the grocery, in and out of the fresh steaming piles of horse manure, the wheels of passing carts and automobiles, along the iron spikes of the stairway to the cellar, the jagged edge of the open garbage cans, the crumbly steps of the old farmhouses still left on one side of the street.

As I go back to the block now, and for a moment fold my body up again in its narrow arena—there, just there, between the black of the asphalt and the old women in their kerchiefs and flowered housedresses sitting on the tawny kitchen chairs—the back wall of the drugstore still rises up to test me. Every day we smashed a small black viciously hard regulation handball against it with fanatical cuts and drives and slams, beating and slashing at it almost in hatred for the blind strength of the wall itself. I was never good enough at handball, was always practicing some trick shot that might earn me esteem, and when I was weary of trying, would often bat a ball down Chester Street just to get myself to Blake Avenue. I have this memory of playing one-o’-cat by myself in the sleepy twilight, at a moment when everyone else had left the block. The sparrows floated down from the telephone wires to peck at every fresh pile of horse manure, and there was a smell of brine from the delicatessen store, of egg crates and of the milk scum left in the great metal cans outside the grocery, of the thick white paste oozing out from behind the fresh Hecker’s Flour ad on the metal signboard. I would throw the ball in the air, hit it with my bat, then with perfect satisfaction drop the bat to the ground and run to the next sewer cover. Over and over I did this, from sewer cover to sewer cover, until I had worked my way to Blake Avenue and could see the park.

With each clean triumphant ring of my bat against the gutter leading me on, I did the whole length of our block up and down, and never knew how happy I was just watching the asphalt rise and fall, the curve of the steps up to an old farmhouse. The farmhouses themselves were streaked red on one side, brown on the other, but the steps themselves were always gray. There was a tremor of pleasure at one place; I held my breath in nausea at another. As I ran after my ball with the bat heavy in my hand, the odd successiveness of things in myself almost choked me, the world was so full as I ran—past the cobblestoned yards into the old farmhouses, where stray chickens still waddled along the stones; past the little candy store where we went only if the big one on our side of the block was out of Eskimo Pies; past the three neighboring tenements where the last of the old women sat on their kitchen chairs yawning before they went up to make supper. Then came Mrs. Rosenwasser’s house, the place on the block I first identified with what was farthest from home, and strangest, because it was a “private” house; then the fences around the monument works, where black cranes rose up above the yard and you could see the smooth gray slabs that would be cut and carved into tombstones, some of them already engraved with the names and dates and family virtues of the dead.

Beyond Blake Avenue was the pool parlor outside which we waited all through the tense September afternoons of the World’s Series to hear the latest scores called off the ticker tape—and where as we waited, banging a ball against the bottom of the wall and drinking water out of empty coke bottles, I breathed the chalk off the cues and listened to the clocks ringing in the fire station across the street. There was an old warehouse next to the pool parlor; the oil on the barrels and the iron staves had the same rusty smell. A block away was the park, thick with the dusty gravel I liked to hear my shoes crunch in as I ran round and round the track; then a great open pavilion, the inside mysteriously dark, chill even in summer; there I would wait in the sweaty coolness before pushing on to the wading ring where they put up a shower on the hottest days.

Beyond the park the “fields” began, all those still unused lots where we could still play hard ball in perfect peace—first shooing away the goats and then tearing up goldenrod before laying our bases. The smell and touch of those “fields,” with their wild compost under the billboards of weeds, goldenrod, bricks, goat droppings, rusty cans, empty beer bottles, fresh new lumber, and damp cement, lives in my mind as Brownsville’s great open door, the wastes that took us through to the west. I used to go round them in summer with my cousins selling near-beer to the carpenters, but always in a daze, would stare so long at the fibrous stalks of the goldenrod as I felt their harshness in my hand that I would forget to make a sale, and usually go off sick on the beer I drank up myself. Beyond! Beyond! Only to see something new, to get away from each day’s narrow battleground between the grocery and the back wall of the drugstore! Even the other end of our block, when you got to Mrs. Rosenwasser’s house and the monument works, was dear to me for the contrast. On summer nights, when we played Indian trail, running away from each other on prearranged signals, the greatest moment came when I could plunge into the darkness down the block for myself and hide behind the slabs in the monument works. I remember the air whistling around me as I ran, the panicky thud of my bones in my sneakers, and then the slabs rising in the light from the street lamps as I sped past the little candy store and crept under the fence.

In the darkness you could never see where the crane began. We liked to trap the enemy between the slabs and sometimes jumped them from great mounds of rock just in from the quarry. A boy once fell to his death that way, and they put a watchman there to keep us out. This made the slabs all the more impressive to me, and I always aimed first for that yard whenever we played follow-the-leader. Day after day the monument works became oppressively more mysterious and remote, though it was only just down the block; I stood in front of it every afternoon on my way back from school, filling it with my fears. It was not death I felt there—the slabs were usually faceless. It was the darkness itself, and the wind howling around me whenever I stood poised on the edge of a high slab waiting to jump. Then I would take in, along with the fear, some amazement of joy that I had found my way out that far.

Beyond! Beyond! Beyond was “the city,” connected only by interminable subway lines and some old Brooklyn-Manhattan trolley car rattling across Manhattan Bridge. At night, as the trolley ground its way home in the rain through miles of unknown streets from some meeting in the Jewish Daily Forward building on the East Side to which my father had taken me, I saw the flickering light bulbs in the car, the hard yellow benches on which we sat half asleep, the motorman’s figure bulging the green curtain he had drawn against the lights in the car, as a rickety cart stumbling through infinite space—the driver taking us where? Beyond was the wheeze of an accordion on the Staten Island ferry boat—the music rocking in such unison with the vibration of the engines as the old man walked in and out of the cars on the lower...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Frontispiece
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgment
• From the Subway to the Synagogue
• The Kitchen
• The Block and Beyond
• Summer: The Way to Highland Park
• About the Author