Alfred Kazin (1915–1998)

I didn't exactly enjoy "A Walker in the City" but I'm glad that it exists. If nothing else, it effectively preserves the author's memories of growing up in the poor Jewish section of Brownsville, Brooklyn in the twenties and thirties, and that's not nothing. Kazin writes both vividly and sentimentally, if not particularly economically, and the book might be called, in a narrow way, a success. Readers interested in the works of say, Mailer, Roth and Bellow might find something of interest show more here, although it should be noted that Kazin seems to have grown up significantly poorer than most of their characters -- middle-class Jews lived about a neighborhood away from his family. Kazin's a bit unlike them in temperament, too, resembling -- as another reviewer has noted -- nobody so much as the shy, sensitive narrator of Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep." This, and the highly constricted artistic elitism that Kazin grows into as a teenager may not endear him to every reader. Nor will his penchant for nostalgia, which seems to have formed early -- many of these walks around New York were made while looking for the vanished, grimy, gas-lit New York of an earlier era. In truth, "A Walker in the City" works best as a collection of lovely images and sentences. There's a bit of Joycean rapture here, but little narrative push. Still, I hardly minded, even though the book put me to sleep on more than one occasion. Certain audiences, though, may really like this one more than I did. show less

A quick read, filled with longing reminiscences and elegant prose, A WALKER IN THE CITY has been on my long-range to-read list for probably fifty years, ever since I heard it lavishly praised by some of my favorite profs in grad school. And now, after waiting so long, the actual reading seems a bit anticlimactic, as some of Kazin's memories seem only 'quaint,' by today's standards. But Alfred Kazin's memories of growing up poor, and a stutterer, in Brooklyn's Jewish ghetto of Brownsville, show more are still pretty darned interesting, conveying all the sights, sounds and smells of the tenements, the markets, the street vendors and the old wooden synagogue.

Kazin's memories range from his childhood through adolescence, when sex, he learned -

"... in the 'Coney Island' dives, outside the school, was like going to the toilet ... Sex was a grim test where sooner or later you would have to prove yourself doing things to women."

Kazin's stories almost immediately reminded me of Henry Roth's classic novel of that same era, CALL IT SLEEP, which I did read during grad school, as well as some of Philip Roth's early works, especially his coming-of-age novel, LETTING GO.

I especially enjoyed the final piece where Alfred ventured out of Brownsville, discovered a much larger public library, and began devouring books by Blake, Whitman, Hemingway, O'Neill and countless other great writers that I would be discovering myself 30-40 years later.

A very good book that has stayed in print for nearly 70 years now. I'm glad I finally read it. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

A few years back I read Alfred Kazin's first memoir, A WALKER IN THE CITY, about his Brownsville and Brooklyn boyhood, and quite enjoyed it, since, as an English major, I read many of his book reviews, essays and columns back in college and grad school. So this sequel, STARTING OUT IN THE THIRTIES (1962) - a 1989 reprint from Cornell University Press - caught my attention at a recent AAUW used book sale. It covers Kazin's life from age nineteen in 1934 through 1940, in the depths of the show more Great Depression, with a brief Epilogue from 1945. On page one, he tells us -

"... I was a 'Socialist,' like everyone else I knew ... 'Socialism' was a way of life, since everyone else I knew in New York was a Socialist, more or less ..."

This rather sets the tone for a volume with much to say about not just Socialism, but also Marxism and Communism and various other 'isms' at play in those very hard times. Kazin was fortunate to get a job writing for the "New Republic" magazine, under Malcolm Cowley, which didn't pay much, but it gave him a foothold and then a platform in the literary world, where he met folks like Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, James T. Farrell, Henry Roth, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, William Saroyan, Granville Hicks, Mary McCarthy and more. Thirty years later I was reading the works of all those writers, and, as part of my collage research papers, I also read many of Kazin's (and Hicks's and Leslie Fiedler's) reviews, so yeah, I could relate. But there is also quite a lot here about Stalin's purges and gulags, and then Hitler's sudden rise to power.

He also tells of his many friendships and of meeting his first wife, Natasha, in the summer of 1938, their marriage two weeks later, and their idyllic early years together. And of his summer in Provincetown on Cape Cod in 1940, where numerous intellectuals gathered.

I must confess that I skimmed parts of the book, the tedious (to me) sections about the politics and tensions of the times. There is, I believe a third volume of memoirs by Kazin, but I think I'll probably pass on that one. This one was a "just okay" read. But hey, it was only a buck, so I'm not complaining. Enough said.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Hailed by people whose opinion I respect as one of the greatest of all memoirs; I'm not in a position to judge, since I probably haven't read as many as those who confidently make such pronouncements. But I'm glad they pointed me toward this; it is very, very good.