5.

The Longest Journey

DANIEL FUCHS, BERNARD MALAMUD, ALFRED KAZIN

“One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan—or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.”

So begins Norman Podhoretz’s brash but thoughtful book Making It (1967), which charts his own voyage from a poor and marginalized section of Brooklyn to a place that to anyone who stayed behind was “a country as foreign to him as China and infinitely more frightening. That country is sometimes called the upper middle class.” But Podhoretz didn’t have it as bad as those who made a similar journey a decade or two earlier. He was born in 1930, too late to be fully aware of what the Great Depression cost. Like him, Daniel Fuchs (born 1909), Bernard Malamud (1914), and Alfred Kazin (1915) were Jewish writers raised in Brooklyn by immigrant parents. But they had to make their way into adulthood and success in the thirties, just as the land of opportunity reached a brutal low ebb.

While Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and Thomas Wolfe chose to exile themselves from Manhattan to Brooklyn as adults, a crowd of other writers were clamoring to get out of the poor, seemingly hopeless Brooklyn neighborhoods where they grew up. Fuchs, Malamud, and Kazin were all children of the huge wave of Jewish immigrants that transformed New York in the early decades of the twentieth century. Many of these newcomers were reeling from ruthless persecution in Eastern Europe, and they heard the call of those lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, from the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus”: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

During this period, Brooklyn increasingly held out the promise of something marginally better than miserable Manhattan slums like the Lower East Side, now bursting at the rotten seams. But before long, the influx filled and overfilled places like Williamsburg and Brownsville, too, leaving the huddled masses still yearning to breathe free. Brooklyn grew to have a very sizable Jewish presence, a significant element of the character of the borough to this day. The immigrant Brooklyn that Fuchs, Malamud, and Kazin knew as they came of age felt far removed from the dreamlike spires of Manhattan’s skyline. As they grew up to acquire an understanding of the world where ideas flowed, where achievement happened, they also came to appreciate that they lived outside of it. And they wanted badly to get in.

All three managed to gain admission to “City,” the City College of New York, a cherished goal of so many impoverished Jewish parents of the era. City College was the first free public institution of higher education in the nation and is the alma mater of nine Nobel laureates. An extraordinary number of the Jews who shaped intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century graduated from City, including Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, and Nathan Glazer, all of them central players among the “New York intellectuals.” Almost to a one, they traveled by subway from immigrant homes to the upper Manhattan campus to debate the political issues of the day in the renowned Alcove One. The school was “famous, awesome, severe,” in the words of Kazin, who attended City College in the thirties. In that decade in particular, if you were mired in the slums of New York, this was the ticket up and out. For Fuchs, Kazin, and Malamud, great literary accomplishment followed. But to reach those heights from the depths of Depression-era Brooklyn, they had to undertake and undergo an almost violent passage that Malamud described in a rare moment of self-revelation: “I beat myself into shape with a terrible will.”

Fuchs wrote a trio of Brooklyn novels in the thirties that have since gained a small cult following. He was one of six children raised in a tenement with six families per floor and an upstairs brothel. A seventh child had been killed when he was pushed off the roof of a building on the Lower East Side at age five. Fuchs’s father, whose family had brought him to America from Russia, had developed lung disease from working as a furrier and had become incapacitated and penniless before Fuchs was born. He later sold papers from a newsstand so small that his foot wore a groove in the wall as he sat cross-legged on a stool day after day.

They lived in Williamsburg, the neighborhood Miller had adored as a child. By Fuchs’s adolescence, in the 1920s, the streets had gained a harder edge. Fuchs’s Williamsburg, in fact, is precisely the one that Miller’s anti-Semitic parents wanted to escape when they left for Bushwick two decades earlier. Now it was more crowded, much more, and a “sweaty dinginess” clung to the aging tenements. The neighborhood had different pockets of immigrants, including German families like the Millers and Irish ones like the Nolans in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But the residents were more and more likely to be Jewish, and they were often badly struggling.

Walking around as a youth, Fuchs took in the place with curiosity and wonder. He would see bums lingering by the garbage cans, couples grappling each other in the street with nowhere else to go, and regular fistfights. One day after school, in daylight, he saw two men get out of a car with pistols in hand, walk into a corner candy store on South Third Street, and execute a man sitting at the counter where they sold malted shakes and sodas—a gang murder. A cop watched the whole thing, but when the shots rang out he bolted in the opposite direction.

The thirties, when Fuchs came to be a writer, gave rise to a rash of autobiographical fiction about the urban poor, much of it shot through with the radical-left politics and militancy that was gaining currency during the Depression (particularly at City College). Kazin pointed out that whereas many of the essential male writers of the twenties had come “from ‘good’ families”—Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald—the thirties were “the age of the plebes,” of “those whose struggle was to survive,” those who “wore a proletarian scowl on their faces as familiar as the cigarette butt pasted in their mouths.” Henry Roth, James T. Farrell, Michael Gold, and, in film and theater, Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan—trailblazers like these, disproportionately Jewish, “moved the streets, the stockyards, the hiring halls into literature,” in Kazin’s words.

This movement provided an enlivening shot in the arm of fiction, but much of its output has fallen into obscurity; political outrage played such a central role that it dated and often distorted the work. Although Roth was a Communist and painted a dark picture of his harsh New York upbringing in Call It Sleep (1934), one of the most successful and lasting novels of its kind, the Communist party line was that the book was too aesthetic and bourgeois. Gold hewed closer to the right views. He served as editor of the Communist magazine New Masses and wrote the autobiographical novel Jews Without Money (1930), which gained international attention in leftist circles for its own grim portrayal of the Lower East Side—a place that could as easily have been, in Gold’s view, “a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world.” An influential essay of Gold’s, calling for a commitment to “proletarian realism,” suggests some of the strident extremism that animated his work.

The worst example and the best of what we do not want to do is the spectacle of Proust, master-masturbator of the bourgeois literature.… Proletarian realism is never pointless. It does not believe in literature for its own sake, but in literature that is useful, has a social function.

Fuchs had his own stories of hardship to tell. But in the thick of this political atmosphere and fresh from City College, he proved to be a remarkably apolitical writer. He documented with a discerning eye a cold and claustrophobic environment—the Jewish Brooklyn he knew—but he pointedly declined to hold out the prospect of a revolution or even an escape. For him it was enough to show what happened in a small world with invisible walls. Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937), all published when Fuchs was in his twenties, have sometimes been misleadingly called his “Williamsburg Trilogy.” The books do not form a real trilogy in terms of character or plot, and the last work takes place in a different section of Brooklyn, a fictional grim seaside area resembling Brighton Beach, where he was living at the time. Three decades later Fuchs recalled his approach in his first book: “I was determined to write fairly. I wanted to be like the man from Mars. I wanted to examine everything with an absolutely clear view, unencumbered and unaffected.” For many of Fuchs’s contemporaries at City College, ideas represented the only salvation from the rock-hard reality they encountered. Fuchs flipped this arrangement on its head, putting reality first. Discussing his Brooklyn novels late in life, he wrote:

I had “ideas” for each of these books, but I soon tired of them, ideas being—for me, at any rate—unsatisfactory. I abandoned them … and devoted myself simply to the tenement: the life in the hallways, the commotion at the dumbwaiters, the assortment of characters in the building, their strivings and preoccupations, their troubles in the interplay of the sexes.

Life, in other words, became Fuchs’s subject—but life as it is lived in very close quarters, where people are forever bumping up against things and turning down hallways that lead nowhere. Wealth and possibility might be just across the river, but here, where old women peddle pretzels all day on Havemeyer Street, they might as well be fairy tales.

Near the beginning of Summer in Williamsburg, Philip Hayman, the stand-in for Fuchs, seeks to gain some understanding of a local suicide. An old man counsels him to simply observe, to compile “a dictionary of Williamsburg.” The dictionary Hayman/Fuchs creates would be unrecognizable to the young, hip residents of Williamsburg today, who come to live among other creative people, talking of blogs, bistros, and farmers’ markets, day jobs in web design. If they harbor any nostalgia for the neighborhood’s rough-and-tumble days, these novels would take little time to disabuse them of the feeling.

In Fuchs’s portrayal, the place is “a closed-in canyon” where everyone is flushed into the hallways and into the fetid summer streets by the suffocation of tenement apartments. The dramas of a life lived close to the bone play out in the open, and privacy and often dignity disappear. A fight between two women in Summer in Williamsburg brings out a crowd to see one rip the other’s kimono—something to break up the doldrums. The streets are a shabby stage, but a stage nonetheless, and Fuchs lends a vibrancy to sidewalk theater, particularly in Homage to Blenholt. But in all three of the Fuchs novels, ideals give way to a coarse fight to thrive where only the corrupt can thrive. Virtue leads to continued poverty, vice is sometimes rewarded, and dreamers give up hope. A father in Blenholt ends up seeing “the exact point at which his son had changed from youth to resigned age.” As Boris Fishman wrote in the New Republic, Fuchs’s books are “cumulatively a counterhistory to the official triumphant bildungsroman of modern American Jewry.” In other words, the trilogy could be called “Not Making It.”

*   *   *

Bernard Malamud’s father bore a strong similarity to the good guys in Fuchs’s work: Max Malamud, too, got little for being good. He came from Russia to America, fleeing the pogroms, in 1905 or 1906, at the height of the immigration boom, first settling on Flushing Avenue in Williamsburg a few years before Fuchs’s parents arrived. He had very little education, as the surviving letters to his son make poignantly evident. After relocating for good to 1111 Gravesend Avenue (now called McDonald Avenue), he worked an endless succession of days in a foundering little grocery store he ran. “He used to get up at six a.m. and work seven days a week, until about ten or eleven p.m., apparently the kind of life he was used to and the only kind he would respect,” Malamud wrote. (The store was located near the Washington Cemetery, about halfway between Prospect Park and Coney Island, in a place that has fallen under various neighborhood names over time.) The relatively few Jews who lived in the area when the Malamuds did were mainly shopkeepers, who struggled along quietly before struggling along desperately. “It was not very good anywhere until the Depression,” Malamud said, “then it was bad.”

In his family “nobody starved,” Malamud said, but financial anxiety hummed steadily as the business drifted downhill, particularly in the 1930s, when Malamud was in his teens and twenties and still living at home. The family made their home above the store, but the place they really lived was behind the counter, where Malamud’s mother and Malamud himself also did their time. The parents spent days climbing up and down the stairs in their own “closed-in canyon,” in a box that essentially defined the limits of their horizons. They had no social life to speak of and little time for Bernard and his troubled younger brother, Eugene. “There were no books that I remember in the house, no records, music, pictures on the wall,” Malamud once said. “On Sundays I listened to somebody’s piano through the window.”

Private troubles entangled themselves with the economic woes. Malamud helped save his mother’s life at thirteen by getting help after she attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of disinfectant, a scene re-created in his novel Dubin’s Lives (1979). But he couldn’t save her when she died mysteriously in a mental hospital two years later, on Mother’s Day 1929. Eugene dropped out of high school within a few years and later entered a never-ending loop of psychiatric care. Malamud faced very long odds.

His father’s belief in education, along with Malamud’s own intelligence and drive, helped propel him out of the canyon—the family’s lone escapee. When Malamud was nine, he caught a serious pneumonia, “and when I was convalescing my father bought me The Book of Knowledge, twenty volumes where there had been none.” Around that time, Bernard made his way into an exceptional new elementary school well outside his district, P.S. 181 in Flatbush; his parents may have used their prior address. (The school is still in operation but, like the surrounding district, it has a radically different demographic makeup. Malamud ran with a crowd of fellow Jewish boys there; in 2009 the school had 1,088 black students and 14 white ones.) From there it was on to Erasmus Hall High School, something of a legendary institution in the annals of the American dream; it was sometimes called the “mother of high schools.” Dutch settlers founded it in 1786, with funds contributed by such men as Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. After the school became public in 1896, the city expanded it in the early twentieth century to house an exploding immigrant population hungry to climb the social ladder; in Malamud’s era, enrollment stood at around eight thousand. The new buildings were designed in the Collegiate Gothic style and, in both appearance and massive scale, the main quadrangle resembles Yale University’s residential colleges. (Today, alas, a huge Rite Aid stands across the street.) At Erasmus, a first-rate school during his time, Malamud excelled and began to apply himself to writing. Next stop City College, of course.

As he crossed the river to Manhattan and moved into the more cosmopolitan realm he had longed for, growing pains soon set in. Malamud came from immigrant Brooklyn, and his father came from a shtetl. In the eyes of cocktail-party New York, Malamud came from nowhere. And unlike his parents, he gained enough worldliness to fully understand that perception. In an unprinted portion of a 1974 Paris Review interview, he told of being in college and looking in at his father through the window of the store and seeing him with fresh eyes.

I felt, my God, here’s this man sitting here 16 hours a day, waiting for someone to come in to the place, what a shameful waste of life, and existence, and all that, and why does he do it? Why does he allow himself to be victimized in this particular way, and you know, it’s a form of imprisonment, and I was conscious of that, and I wanted better for him, you know, I felt a really strong sympathy for him. He was a good man, he was a nice man, he was a kind man, and I feel, you know, just eternally grateful to him.

In this passage, Malamud’s appreciation and empathy come on strong at the end, as if to correct a discernible exasperation earlier on. Malamud clearly regrets that his father suffered but also suggests that he was complicit in the suffering, using the word “shameful” and adding, “Why does he allow himself to be victimized.” It’s a conflicted attitude familiar to many children of immigrants, but it is particularly emblematic of the experience of early-twentieth-century Jewish sons, who traveled so far so fast. (In this era and milieu, it was the sons, more than the daughters, whose success was paramount.) Irving Howe expertly addresses the phenomenon in his landmark book on Jewish immigration, World of Our Fathers (1976). The men who had come through Ellis Island, Howe writes, knew that circumstance and a lack of learning trapped them—“in the awkwardness of their speech, in the alienness of their manners”—in a very tight space. They determined, then, “that everything would now be staked on their sons, a decision any Jewish father could share without even being aware of it, so deeply had it come out of the reserves of common desire. In behalf of its sons [this generation] was prepared to commit suicide; perhaps it did.”

The process placed a heavy burden on the shoulders of the young people it was supposed to help. In his memoir A Walker in the City, Kazin writes, “It was not for myself alone that I was expected to shine, but for [my parents]—to redeem the constant anxiety of their existence. I was the first American child, their offering to the strange new God; I was to be the monument of their liberation from the shame of being—what they were.” To prove yourself, then, was to put a great distance between yourself and the people who loved you and gave you the chance. And what if you did so? Certainly Fuchs, Malamud, and Kazin all did. Then the psychological strain merely took on a different form. Howe writes that the high achiever in this position, beginning even in childhood, felt “a half-acknowledged shame before the perceived failings of one’s parents, and both embarrassment and shame mounted insofar as one began to acquire the tastes of the world. And then, still more painful, there followed a still greater shame at having felt ashamed about people whom one knew to be good.” This was in many ways the measure of that immense journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan that Podhoretz describes. It was not only an intellectual and material challenge; it was an emotional crucible.

Podhoretz goes so far as to say that if he had known what was involved, if the voyage had not been blind, he would not have wanted to make it: “There was a kind of treason in it: treason toward my family, treason toward my friends. In choosing the road I chose, I was pronouncing a judgment on them, and the fact that they themselves concurred in the judgment makes the whole thing sadder but no less cruel.” When someone tells you, “Go on ahead and leave me behind,” and you do it, you can choose to look back or you can choose not to. Either way it pains you.

*   *   *

City College did not propel Malamud quickly into success. He found it disappointing after Erasmus Hall, where he had thrived, and the intense political atmosphere did not ignite his interest. After graduating he worked as a public-school teacher in training, twice failing the exam that would have made him eligible for a permanent substitute job like Fuchs’s; he earned $4.50 a day, while lucky Fuchs took in $6.00 the same decade. Malamud enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia in 1937, which he called “close to a waste of time.” He took odd jobs at factories and department stores, and in the thick of the Depression he often visited the miserable job agencies on Sixth Avenue. For long stretches in the late thirties he was unemployed and not doing much writing. His priority was to try to earn; he was part of that new crop of writers whose background meant that “there was nothing to go back to,” as Kazin put it. In 1940 he took a mindless job in the U.S. Census Bureau in Washington. He found he could complete his tasks in half the day and spend the rest writing at his desk. His sketches of real life began to appear in the Washington Post and later he placed short stories in little magazines for no pay, but the entire forties passed before Pearl Kazin, Alfred’s sister and an editor at Harper’s Bazaar, made him a professional fiction writer. In 1950 she published “The Cost of Living.”

In this short story and in several others—notably “The Grocery Store” (written in 1943, published only posthumously), “The Place Is Different Now” (1943), “Take Pity” (1956), and “The First Seven Years” (1950)—Malamud used many of the brushstrokes that would find their way into his second published novel and one of his best, The Assistant (1957). Each prefigures elements of the longer work’s plot, and each derives its setting and subject from Malamud’s Brooklyn youth, exploring not his own life so much as his father’s. By the time Malamud’s first paid writing appeared, he had relocated to Oregon to take a college teaching job. Malamud had used education to vault himself out of Brooklyn, to surpass by miles his father’s social standing, to become that foreign being, a writer. And now, after some years of searching for his footing, he was finding it back in his homeland. Back in the world he had worked hard to escape, he found everything he needed. “Brooklyn you are the universe,” he once wrote.

Before publishing The Assistant, Malamud wrote his fanciful and mythic baseball novel The Natural (1952) and sold it to the legendary editor Robert Giroux, then at Harcourt, Brace, and later the chairman of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Giroux would remain Malamud’s editor his whole life. The Natural is probably now Malamud’s most famous book, due mostly to the 1984 Robert Redford movie, which strays far from the novel. When Giroux bought the manuscript, he did so partly on the strength of “The Magic Barrel,” a Malamud story that later appeared to widespread praise in Partisan Review. He found it “wholly unlike” The Natural and “also unlike anyone else’s writing anywhere.” Sealing the deal, he told Malamud, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Malamud caught the reference instantly, replying, “Emerson to Whitman.”

“The Magic Barrel” became the title story for a 1958 collection, which draws so much from the author’s roots that Malamud’s biographer Philip Davis aptly says it is “like a Jewish Brooklyn version of Joyce’s Dubliners.” As Joshua Cohen puts it, Malamud’s work is “a map of the world with Brooklyn as its capital, a tenement as the silver crown of the cityscape.” The Magic Barrel won the National Book Award. Malamud took the honor again in 1967 for The Fixer, which also won the Pulitzer Prize. The Assistant sold well over a million copies in its first twenty years. Malamud became widely recognized as a member of a powerful triumvirate of American writers who transcended the “Jewish writer” label and gained widespread fame: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud. Bellow took to calling them literature’s Hart, Schaffner & Marx, after the clothing business founded by three Jewish men.

The slices of Brooklyn life in some of Malamud’s stories crystallized into a much fuller portrait in The Assistant, but Malamud still did not offer a wide shot or a long view of Brooklyn and its history, at least not at first glance. The Assistant shows us Malamud’s father’s world, and it is simple, unromantic, and painfully small. The rest of the country and its news barely intrude, Manhattan is an overseas nation, and little occurs outside the dark hovel of a barely visited grocery store operated by Morris Bober. As Kazin points out, Morris and Malamud’s Jews generally are not connected to the wider Jewish working class and its place in history, “its unions, its collective strikes, its dreams of socialism.” A dreary loneliness reigns. For just that reason, though, the novel provides a truthful portrait of Brooklyn life and American life in the thirties. The Depression fostered a spiritually damaging sense of living in a shrinking sphere. As Arthur Krystal has written, “The Thirties were not just about a lack of opportunity; they were also about hopelessness.” Even Morris’s gifted college-age daughter, Helen, fears that she is trapped. As she eloquently puts it, “I feel that every day is like the day before, and what’s worse, like the day after.… I want the return of my possibilities.”

For all its faithful re-creation of hard times, The Assistant often has the feel of a parable, with schematic moral conflicts and an atmosphere that feels obscurely a bit unreal. But it’s no fairy tale; as in Fuchs, honesty, poverty, and industriousness don’t add up to much, and sometimes perversely get punished. Two hoodlums rob the store and can’t believe how little money there is to take. In an instance of Malamud’s faintly comic but dark irony, one of them knocks Morris out cold, thinking he’s hiding cash. If only he were. One day an Italian Gentile named Frank comes to the store and begins doing a bit of work for no pay. Gradually he insinuates himself into the place, despite opposition from Morris and his wife. In a poignant broken English that became a Malamud trademark, Morris tells Frank he isn’t interested in his arguments, and continues: “‘Interests me what you can learn here. Only one thing’—he pressed his hand to his chest—‘a heartache.’”

We learn that Frank was one of the men who robbed the grocery, the reluctant accomplice, and he has returned incognito to do penance. A simple ethical setup—but complexity mounts, as is typical in Malamud, when Frank begins to steal from the store even as he brings an increase in business. He also falls for Helen. In spite of all obstacles and flaws (and his religion), Frank seems the better choice for her, sentimentally, than the slick law student who took her virginity. But Frank’s increasingly serious transgressions incline in a different direction. The Assistant is about suffering, and the question at its center is whether enduring pain, or at least the kind in the novel, is worth it—whether it earns you grace or simply turns your life into a depressing waste.

Malamud was not religious and neither, really, were his parents, but in The Assistant he seems to be coming to terms with the unique identity of immigrant Jews like his father and what they left to their sons and daughters, so many of whom grew up in Brooklyn. Malamud had become a success, but “almost without understanding why,” as he said much later, he had begun thinking about his parents, about his father’s “meager living and what he paid for it”: “I thought of him as I began The Assistant and felt I would often be writing about Jews, in celebration and expiation, though perhaps that was having it both ways. I wanted it both ways.”

Malamud has fallen well out of the company of Bellow and Roth in reputation, but the point Bellow was making with his quip about Hart, Schaffner & Marx still applies. In the time of the three writers’ midcentury ascendancy, Bellow said, minority groups were staging cultural challenges to the WASP establishment, and the rise of a supposed “Jewish mafia” was greeted as an “unwelcome eruption.” The absurdity of it was that these three men wanted only “to add ourselves to the thriving enterprise we loved; no one wanted to take over.” As with Bellow and Roth, Malamud’s stories were Jewish stories and outsider stories, but the resonance in them was American. To immigrate, to work and endure, to raise your children above your own shoulders—what is this but the American story?

*   *   *

Alfred Kazin also lived that story and bore unique witness to it, with all the verve and gusto of the recently arrived, the recently transformed. Kazin rose from a Brooklyn ghetto to become one of the leading literary critics during a golden age of criticism. When On Native Grounds, his elegant and authoritative book on modern American literature, appeared in 1942, he was twenty-seven years old and he turned overnight into a highbrow superstar. The New Republic hired him as the next literary editor, a mountaintop previously occupied by Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson. He became probably the foremost critic in the nation in the forties, when the cachet of the profession was still in ascent. Even with small circulations, the “little magazines” that made a home for the circle of writers Kazin joined wielded a big stick. Fewer than fifteen thousand read Partisan Review, the most prestigious of them all, but as Sam Tanenhaus has written, “Who cared? Every initiate knew that revolutions are created not by the untutored mob but by the vanguard, who see with clarity ‘what is to be done.’” The word “revolutions” is instructive. These magazines proudly published radical material, and the unabashed ambition was to change things from what they were to what they ought to be.

Kazin had walked into the offices of the New York Times at nineteen to challenge John Chamberlain over one of his columns, and Chamberlain admired his chutzpah and his mind enough to scribble a recommendation note that called him “an intelligent radical.” But Kazin’s pieces didn’t aim to incite any overthrows. As Bellow said of Malamud, Roth, and himself, the intention was to join a great tradition rather than overturn it, and the country was just now making it possible and even propitious for young men like them to succeed. The story of that potent combination of talent and history became Kazin’s great subject, as Jed Perl has argued. Kazin’s trio of personal histories, A Walker in the City (1951), Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), and New York Jew (1978), together form a powerful collective memoir of a generation of thinkers.

Kazin’s family’s experience and his early poverty made him an unlikely believer in the American experiment. Like Malamud’s parents, Kazin’s emigrated from Eastern Europe early in the century and found themselves barely scraping by in the Depression. They lived at 256 Sutter Avenue in Brownsville, near the end of the IRT line at New Lots. It was “the margin of the city,” Kazin remarked, “the last place, the car barns where they locked up the subway and trolley cars.” Here there was plenty of space, at least on the edges, but most of it, Kazin observed, was “dead land, neither country nor city, with that look of prairie waste I have so often seen on my walks along the fringes of American cities near the freight yards.” Here is where Jews were welcome, and here is where they came in multitudes. Developers reeled them in with promises of more room than could be had on the Lower East Side. The Kazins joined the migration, leaving a Lower East Side boardinghouse for the Brownsville apartment they occupied for the next forty years. “When I was a child,” Kazin wrote in A Walker in the City, his unusual and moving memoir of his early years, “I thought we lived at the end of the world.”

The wave of new residents, many of them in the garment trade, grew massive after the subway was extended into the neighborhood in 1920–22. A dizzying conversion made Brownsville “the Jerusalem of America.” In 1925 it was 95 percent Jewish, split up into mini-neighborhoods housing those who had emigrated from the same part of “the old country.” Landsmanschaften, associations organized by immigrants from the same area or even the same village, sprang up and provided both a social life and an ad hoc safety net, paying for personal emergencies out of the pool of membership dues. Halfway down the block from the Kazins’ synagogue was another they never set foot in; “it belonged to people from another province.” More than seventy Orthodox synagogues lined the streets by the end of the thirties. A hush fell on Friday nights for Shabbos, with candles lit in windows all around, and the peace remained through sundown Saturday. On other days, on Belmont Avenue, a pushcart market attracted housewives with bargains on a jumble of household goods, on pickles, on kosher meats. The saleswomen harangued the passersby with a pidgin Yiddish-English. They conducted business year-round, huddling around wood fires in oil drums in the winter. By the late thirties, Brownsville was the most densely populated part of Brooklyn, surpassing even Williamsburg and its slums, with two hundred thousand residents in 2.19 square miles.

Kazin’s parents, both of them Poles from the Minsk area, endured the neighborhood’s typical travails. Alfred’s father, Charles, who had been placed in an orphanage by his mother after his father died, worked as a house painter, which was enough to subsist in the twenties but not enough when the thirties came. A signature memory and motif of Kazin’s youth was seeing his father arrive daily at the front door from the labor pool by the Municipal Bank and hearing his mother, Gita, ask him, “Geyst arbeten?”—“Will there be work?” For nearly the entire thirties, there was not. Gita held the family together with the stitches of the dresses she made for other women in the neighborhood. (She had been a seamstress for a time in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and was lucky to no longer be there when its devastating 1911 fire killed 146 workers and brought to light management abuses and grossly negligent safety standards.)

Charles Kazin dissolved into a spectral presence, emasculated by unemployment, “the loneliest man in the world, more like a son than a father.” This kind of diminution was typical of men in the Depression, perhaps particularly poor and Jewish ones, as Richard Cook points out in Alfred Kazin: A Biography (2007). The world expected them to provide, and they expected it of themselves; their spirit and identity crumbled as that demand went unfulfilled. The humiliation of it, and the resulting imbalance of the family as the mother emerged as the head of household, left a mark on the children of the era. Young Alfred lacked a lot of things, sleeping on three chairs by the country stove in the kitchen in winter, but above all he lacked a dependable father. When Alfred helped haul blocks of ice from a vendor two blocks away to the icebox in the hallway, he carried them with his mother. “To anyone who grew up in a family where the father was usually looking for work,” Kazin wrote in a 1980 book review, “every image of the thirties is gray, embittered.”

For Kazin, elementary school proved to be a trial, not least because he had a stutter so embarrassing that he sometimes pretended not to know the answer rather than try to spit it out. The pressure to excel weighed on him. Even in his teens, at Franklin K. Lane High School, Friday morning tests (and the school obsessively tested the students) “were the terror of my childhood,” he writes. “It was never learning I associated with that school: only the necessity to succeed.” The revealing word there is “necessity.”

Meeting that requirement was a daunting task. It was a tough school, and whispers of boys being sent off to reform school or even the notorious Sing Sing prison made an impression: “Anything less than absolute perfection in school always suggested to my mind that I might fall out of the daily race, be kept back in the working class forever, or—dared I think of it?—fall into the criminal class itself.” That last notion seems absurd, but during this period Brownsville carried the stench of crime, including, notoriously, the organized variety. By 1940 the police declared that Brownsville was “spawning more gangsters and criminals than any other section of the city.” The ones who generated the most press—and “heat”—based their operations out of Midnight Rose’s candy store, a little headquarters on the corner of Saratoga and Livonia Avenues, in the shadow of the Saratoga Avenue station on the elevated train. This group, almost entirely Jewish, carried out hits on behalf of national crime figures (many of them also Jews, like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky). A journalist gave the outfit the name Murder, Inc., and it stuck.

For young men trying to make good, a sense of belonging came from the activist politics that surrounded them. Brownsville was radical enough to have sent eleven Socialists to the New York State Assembly and the city’s Board of Aldermen between 1915 and 1920. Men shouted slogans and speeches from the street corners along Pitkin Avenue, celebrating the worker and decrying not only the corrupt man in Washington but the landlord down the block, a popular target of scorn. Daniel Bell—like Kazin a New York intellectual in the making—delivered an address written by Eugene V. Debs to a welcoming street audience at age thirteen. Kazin himself became a Socialist almost unconsciously; the suffering of the Depression seemed to call for a systemic change, for one, but also “everyone else I knew in New York was a Socialist, more or less.” But he didn’t find his true calling in “the movement.”

Even at City College, the ultimate political hotbed, a sixteen-year-old Kazin found his home not in the debates in Alcove One, but in reading literature. Although family pressure had driven him to study, by now he took great pleasure in the company of writers: “I could swim out from the Brownsville shore to that calm and sunlit sea beyond where great friends came up from the deep.” Unlike many contemporaries, Kazin held no fondness for City, even in retrospect. “The radical ambience was fanatical, arrogant, quite violent at times,” he said later. He preferred his literature class, where he and Malamud sat in the same room, each disenchanted with the school, each knowing next to nothing about the other.

But college did give him access to the world beyond the old neighborhood’s horizons. As a youth he “saw New York as a foreign city” and wanted to escape the confines of his environment to get to the wider American country, to a place “where there was nothing to remind me of Brownsville.” He loved the America of the paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, of skaters in Central Park (New York’s imitation of Norman Rockwell), of the Midwest, of the rugged country that Theodore Roosevelt, an early hero, admired and symbolized. City College did not offer as wide a canvas as that, and it had plenty of reminders of the neighborhood. Eighty-five percent of the students were Jewish and many of them were there for the same reason he was: it was the best place you could go without paying. (Columbia University tuition cost six hundred dollars, and anyway they capped Jewish enrollment, as did the other Ivy League schools.) And yet, on the Convent Avenue campus, in the library or the Great Hall, Kazin glimpsed a life his parents had never known—the life of intellectual pursuit—and got in touch with the revolutionary power not of Marxism but of literary excellence, which outlived those who possessed it: “I looked to literature for strong social argument, intellectual power, human liberation.… Salvation would come by the word, the long-awaited and fatefully exact word that only the true writer would speak.” Kazin would never quite shed a certain insecurity and alienation, but in the early thirties there persisted a subterranean hope and confidence that was just as Malamud evocatively described it: “The thing was there. I had it. It came with me—an almost mystical feeling proclaiming my worth. I felt it when I washed alone.”

After Chamberlain’s note to the New Republic resulted in Kazin’s print debut when he was still in college, a growing number of pieces appeared in several publications after he graduated in 1935. As he writes in Starting Out in the Thirties, through his reviews, Kazin gained an introduction to the city’s circle of editors and writers, particularly those surrounding the New Republic. During this time he met Richard Hofstadter and his wife, Felice Swados, who hosted lively gatherings at 134 Montague Street in Brooklyn and befriended him, to his lasting pleasure: “The brilliance of this young couple seemed to lie like a fine gold over the staid brownstones of Brooklyn Heights.” In the fall of 1937, he enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia, perhaps influenced by Hofstadter’s having started the previous term. As it happened, Malamud enrolled at the same time; like him, Kazin had little good to say about the place.

Not long after Kazin left the program in 1938, the prominent former Columbia professor and editor Carl Van Doren suggested that he ought to write a book the world needed, a literary history focusing on the Americans of the last several decades. Sensing his moment and spurred by the prospect of being published, Kazin took on the project and wrote steadily for over four years about American books and American democracy—and the powerful interplay between the two. Some of On Native Grounds was written at the kitchen table in a two-room apartment at 150 Remsen Street, down the street from one of Henry Miller’s places and around the corner from the Hofstadters and other of Kazin’s friends. (Norman Mailer would soon be living on Remsen as well.) Kazin had finally left his parents’ home and moved there when, at twenty-three, he married a woman he’d known a very short time, Natasha Dohn. But most of Kazin’s book was written in the cavernous main reading room of the New York Public Library—where Henry Miller liked to study, where Marianne Moore first met Elizabeth Bishop, where Thomas Wolfe met up with Aline Bernstein the day they became lovers. Kazin read and wrote day and night, taking breaks in nearby Automats and pool halls with Hofstadter, who was working on his own book; in the Depression era, the library, a refuge and resource for many, opened early and didn’t close until ten at night.

Kazin was at work in the kitchen on Remsen when he heard on the radio in August 1939 that Russia was to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany. “No!” he shouted at the radio, echoing a widespread feeling of outrage, particularly among left-wing Jews. “It’s not true!” Within a week, Hitler invaded Poland and the war was on. Now the world was at a crossroads, and Kazin’s book, which addressed head-on the sweep of history, the advance and retreat of ideas, seemed ever more urgent to him. On Native Grounds spoke hopefully of the headway of progressive American principles, of the persistent democratic strain in American literature. In writing it, Kazin said decades later, “I felt what I have never felt since 1945—that the age was wholly with me, that I was appealing to what Hazlitt called ‘the spirit of the age.’” And in fact, when the book made its big entrance in 1942, the reading public saw the significance of a young and rising Jew seizing his opportunity to write in praise of the democratic idea just when Hitler’s army was wreaking its destruction.

Brooklyn writers like Kazin and Malamud confronted serious hardship as they grew up and as the Depression struck. But as Malamud’s daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, notes in her memoir, My Father Is a Book, when they reached their prime, they found that history was on their side. Coming into their own at midcentury, they embodied a powerful combination of alienation and assimilation, and their work resonated more widely than they might have anticipated. Readers saw themselves in it. They saw the national experience.

In some ways these writers remained outsiders from the Manhattan establishment even after they made that long journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Malcolm Cowley noted with a wry condescension young Kazin’s “heavy Brownsville voice” and his too-naked striving. For his part, Kazin held to an old class resentment brought from home and nursed a long and bitter grudge against Lionel Trilling, who in his view epitomized the Jew who snobbishly turned his back on Jewishness. Meanwhile, a plainly dressed Malamud found himself temporarily excluded from the National Book Awards dinner in his own honor by a confused waiter. Fuchs met a stranger fate. After contentment and success in Hollywood saved him from near-poverty in New York, literary types condescended to him as either a victim of American ignorance or a willful sellout. (As Adam Kirsch memorably remarks about this treatment of Fuchs, “It is easier to shun materialism when you already have the materials.”)

As separate and alienated as they might have felt, though, these writers powerfully did what they set out to do: they made vivid contributions to the flowing current of American literature. And for all of them, the source of their power, the deep reverberation of their created worlds, came from their times in Brooklyn. They had done everything to escape, and yet what ultimately made their success was the return trip. Rendering their Brooklyn days in writing put them in touch with the American narrative they had epitomized almost without knowing it. In their youth they thought everything was happening elsewhere. In fact it was happening all around them from the earliest days.

What makes Kazin’s A Walker in the City his best-known and most read book is that everyone can somehow share in its moving look back on youth. That broad resonance, so evident in the following gorgeous passage, is bound up in the particular experience of seeking out the true beginnings of one’s own searching spirit.

I could never walk across Roebling’s bridge, or pass the hotel on University Place named Albert, in Ryder’s honor, or stop in front of the garbage cans at Fulton and Cranberry Streets in Brooklyn at the place where Whitman had himself printed Leaves of Grass, without thinking that I had at last opened the great trunk of forgotten time in New York in which I, too, I thought, would someday find the source of my unrest.

For the Depression-era writers of Brooklyn, the borough was the source of their unrest, and that unrest made their books essential.