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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Czarist Russia > Item 429
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A Walker in the City
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by Alfred Kazin
Sales Rank: 270633
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List Price: $14.00
$11.20
At Amazon
on 11-1-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 192 pages
Published by: Harvest Books March 19, 1969
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0156941767
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0156941761
Book Dimensions:
8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
Weighs: 5.6 ounces
Product Review
In A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin recalls his childhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn with such tactile specificity that readers, too, will smell "that good and deep odor of lox, of salami, of herrings and half-sour pickles" that emanated from the neighborhood pushcarts. His story is set in the working-class Jewish community of New York City in the decade preceding the Great Depression, but this classic memoir of the first-generation American experience resonates universally. Kazin depicts his younger self as a smart, unhappy kid who dreamed of escape from a confining local landscape. He found in books the road map to a freer territory. In Kazin's case, this was "the city" ("everything just out of Brownsville") whose glamorous institutions--the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden--spoke of an American past and an intellectual community that this son of eastern European immigrants was determined to make his own. (And he did, with his pioneering 1942 critical work, On Native Grounds, published when he was just 27.) Yet Kazin came to understand that the roots he had been so anxious to tear up were the source of his deepest identity. His loving portrait of his past acknowledges the crucial importance of belonging, even as it affirms the compelling necessity of escape. What could be more American? --Wendy Smith
Product Description
Kazin’s memorable description of his life as a young man as he makes the journey from Brooklyn to “americanca”-the greater world that begins at the other end of the subway in Manhattan. A classic portrayal of the Jewish immigrant culture of the 1930s. Drawings by Marvin Bileck.
Reader Reviews
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.
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A Walker in the City
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Price: $11.20
Updated on 11-1-2008.
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