|
Alfred Kazin, in his 1951 memoir A Walker in the
City, describes his boyhood walks in Brownsville, Brooklyn,
then a Jewish immigrant neighborhood.
We were of the city, but somehow not in it. We were
of the city, but somehow not in it. Whenever I went off on
my favorite walk to Highland Park in the American
district to the north, on the border of Queens, and climbed
the hill to the old reservoir from which I could look straight
across to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, I saw New York as
a foreign city. There, brilliant and unreal, the city had
its life, as Brownsville had ours. That the two were joined
in me I never knew then not even on those glorious
summer nights of my last weeks in high school when, with what
an ache, I would come back into Brownsville along Liberty
Avenue, and, as soon as I could see blocks ahead of me the
Labor Lyceum, the malted milk and Fatima signs over the candy
stores, the old women in their housedresses sitting in front
of the tenements like priestesses of an ancient cult, knew
I was home.
Back to the main story
|