This is the first chapter in the author’s memoir: Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers (2012). (Paperback edition available from University of Massachusetts Press.)
I owe Kazin. In A Walker in the City he wrote about walking the same Brownsville streets I had walked; learned Civics from the same crazy (he called him “roguish”) teacher at Lew Wallace Junior High No. 66; dreamed the same dream of crossing over to the real City across the river. That book opened up and made available our whole world of second generation Jewish American life, changed my life—as did I.B. Singer, Isaac Rosenfeld, even Norman Podhoretz—but Kazin was the first and closest to me.
For twenty-five years my father owned a kosher butcher shop on Belmont Avenue, a street Kazin called “the great open street market,” which he loved for its liveliness, as I did, and the “open hearty” market women (and men) who hawked their wares in loud, triumphant voices:
“Vayber! Vayber! Shenyne gute vayber! Oh you lovelies! Oh you good ones! Oh you pretty ones! See how cheap and good! Just come over! Just taste! Just a little look! What will it cost you to taste? How can you resist us? Oh! Oh! Come over! Devour us! Storm us! Tear us apart! Bargains! Bargains!”
When I showed this passage to my mother, who helped out in the store three days a week—the calm, gentle one the customers loved, rather than my irascible father smoking his Lucky Strikes, preferring to read Der Tog—she said the herring and pickle man two stores down had stopped that kind of hawking. So she then showed the passage to him, and, annus mirabilis, he began doing it again, trying for word for word fidelity to the text!
I met Kazin at an American Studies meeting and told him this story, and of course he, like I, pondered the power of art. Taken from life, then influencing life. But he was suspicious when I said that as a teenager I had been friends with Podhoretz, coming from the same neighborhood (we had moved from the depths of Brownsville to the higher status Ocean Hill-Brownsville). “But you lived on St. Marks Avenue, and he was on Pacific Street!” I pointed out that those streets were only two blocks apart, and that we played ball in the same schoolyard; nevertheless I suspected he regarded me as some kind of impostor, an arriviste to those sacred grounds.
I owed him in other crucial ways. My wife, Anne Halley, had taken his course at Minnesota, where he was a temporary guest professor, the year before I arrived there. The other grad students, New Criticism wannabes, disdained Kazin’s emotional, engaged humanism, the catch in his throat when he read Whitman—to them, “non-U” in that snobbish time. Anne responded warmly to his uncomplicated love of literature, and his simple, democratic manner. When she hadn’t finished her term paper before his permanent departure for New York, he called her up, asked her to read what she had written, and gave her an A. In effect he opened the way for me, another Brownsville boy, as Anne chose a few years later to be with me (for fifty-two years) instead of other perfectly nice and accomplished suitors who had asked to marry her.
I owe him much—which makes the revelation in his former wife Ann Birstein’s book, What I Saw at the Fair, so disturbing. At the end of that interesting book about New York intellectual life in the forties and fifties, and the writing of A Walker in the City, in which she played an important part, she reveals that Alfred was physically abusive—he beat her. I am still shocked as I write these words. I know and admire Ann, and we have had good times together at various occasions. She is an attractive, very intelligent woman, and a fine writer. I had always admired Kazin, his fine reviews, On Native Grounds, of course, his liberality, his refusal to go along with the conservative turn of so many of his friends and contemporaries—sticking to his humanistic guns. And then this dirty secret? What to make of it? Am I naïve?
I had to go back and to re-read his 1978 book, New York Jew, the third and beautifully written memoir in the series that began with A Walker in the City. In this later work he presents richly detailed accounts of his life among the New York intellectuals, his career at The New Republic and Time/Life under Henry Luce (an extraordinary portrait of the man and the publications), and evocative accounts of the war and post-war years in the United States and in various western European countries. Moreover, Kazin writes honestly about his sexual awakenings and loves during those years, and of his three marriages. Among these, his second marriage, to Ann, whom he calls “Beth” in the book, gets a good deal of attention. He seems to face up to the many difficulties and joys in that relationship, including bouts of “violent quarrels,” fueled by drinking, so common in those times, especially among intellectuals and, in my experience, academics in literary departments.
One can at first assume that the violence may only have been “verbal abuse,” even though it occasionally involved throwing dishes at one another—perhaps a deliberate ambiguity on Kazin’s part. One of Birstein’s claims in a different but important matter is that Kazin did not give her credit for her working over and helping write every page of A Walker in the City, which he composed while living with her. In New York Jew he does say she went over every line of that work with him, in one of New York’s cafeterias (a credible touch about that time and place!). It may be that he was correcting the oversight Birstein had charged him with. Is her charge of physical abuse overstated? It remains hard to say, though probably not.
Whatever the final truth, it remains a disturbing allegation.
In a sense, I suppose it goes with the times, though still present among all classes of people, and lately we have learned about the abuse of wives in Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox circles. But I am still shocked and puzzled. My father would storm out of the house in anger at times, returning when he’d cooled off; my patriarchal zayde, imperious lifetime president of his small shtiebel shul in Williamsburg; and his father Yitzhok, who bragged of beating Russian gendarmes in his early days—I could not imagine any of them, or Tevye the Milkman, raising an arm in anger at their wives. For one thing, they were all married to strong women, who could and would give as good as they took, despite the supposed subordinate role of women in traditional Judaism. It just didn’t go with the territory. For our generation, I wonder if crossing over into the City, going from the village to Village, our generation’s Americanization may have had some deep flaws in it. Alfred Kazin should have dealt with that, too, “The Woman Question,” in all its complexity and power, as he so often did, brilliantly, with so many of the other fulfillments and disappointments in that process.