Alfred Kazin's autobiographies
Wood, Joe
IF MEMOIRS are always full of lies—and they always are—the measure of a good memoirist is how well she tricks us. Of course, all texts are slippery; it would be foolish to suggest that...
...Mostly these black writers discussed the rules by which fiction should or should not operate...
...Would we, too, die because we could not understand where our murderers came from...
...JOE WOOD is a writer living in Brookyn, N.Y...
...Little Jews...
...Kazin tries to explain his feelings about Pound in a few remarkable paragraphs, condensed only slightly here: The voice was probably not influencing anybody...
...Even the title of his most ambitious memoir, New York Jew, suggests impatience with the confinement of the label...
...The movement certainly affected his life, and judging from the output of the generally left-liberal intellectual circles he was a part of, was a subject he often discussed...
...If the memoirist missed a big chance by not fleshing out his observations about Jewishness and modernism, he did so largely because his sensibility was shaped by his times...
...Perhaps this unconscious explains why Kazin's memoirs are more than a literary individual's account of his fantastic travels...
...They lived where they had always lived, and more and more they lived without hope...
...A great book hides in this set of paragraphs— perhaps several books...
...Jews became regular features of the "world of power" he craved when he first started out...
...And "man" has really turned into human, and so woman, and the elegant nineteenth century is, as it was, no more...
...They settled in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which was a ghetto...
...DISSENT /Fall 1998 n 127...
...Pound himself was to say after the war that no man named Ezra could be an anti-Semite...
...It was not like Hitler's...
...It was not Pound's influence I dreaded...
...The question of whether art is ruined by "sociology" or resistance to oppression was, in 1978, when New York Jew appeared, not new...
...with America itself as the modern...
...But I must admit I also thought that the notebooks might ironically reveal more about the story of this century's American Jews than the polished individual literary life story he had so sedulously stuck to...
...In some cases the greater meaning amounts to an aesthetic or political idea considered valuable by a group to which the memoirist belongs...
...Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day...
...They were as poor and isolated from America-at-large as the day they had met...
...Detroit burning...
...Full flight from the matter is achieved shortly after Kazin announces his deep admiration for Delmore Schwartz's most famous short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities...
...Years after the war, from her children in Israel, I heard in detail of how my aunt refused to flee with everyone else into the forest...
...Yet before dispensing with the title and its obvious irony, readers might want to take pause: why did Kazin name the most sweeping account of his quite complicated life New York Jew...
...By the book's later chapters he scrapes that surface away...
...I like to say we discussed Faulkner, but the truth is I mostly listened to him explain subtleties of The Sound and the Fury...
...Certainly the maelstrom of American modernization depended on the labor of the latest wave of new people...
...On this everlasting subject, we're all tired...
...Most of our visit was spent discussing Light in August and then The Sound and the Fury, which we both admired...
...That was the trouble with "small DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 121 BOOKS Jews...
...the author's early references to Negroes inform readers how easily he'd embraced his own American whiteness...
...New York" was what we put last on our address, but first in thinking of the others around us...
...In fact, Kazin is so self-assuredly Jewish throughout his life, according to the published notebooks, that the kind of fealty he showed Wilson in New York Jew seems impossible...
...In New York Jew Kazin reflected on his parents' situation in the 1950s...
...Kazin begins the passage calling Schwartz's story the greatest fable of "our experience...
...Then he lists some of Pound's wartime utterances: "Politically and economically the U.S...
...But only almost, for therein lies the key to the cabinet...
...Let me remind you why Kazin spends so much time on those modernists: My subject had to do with the "modern" as democracy...
...The line-up was always before my eyes...
...But one particular position—or resistance to it—long defined critical appraisal of, for example, African-American literature, often in these terms: is the work universal...
...So that when the poor Jews left, even Negroes, as we said, found it easy to settle on the margins of Brownsville...
...There is so much to read, and to see...
...Kazin sighs: "A poet shouldn't be that unhappy," Auden said with derision, looking at the photograph on Delmore's book, Summer Knowledge...
...It is to be found in the last quoted sentence: "Even the spacious twin reading rooms, each two blocks long, gave me a sense of the powerful amenity that I craved for my own life, a world of 120 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 power in which my own people had moved about as strangers...
...What once was a gentle slap at a rather innocuous form of poor-Jewish self-hatred gets partially transformed into muted applause for Jewish-American industriousness...
...Which sort of confirms that Kazin stayed around long enough to witness a major movement in American letters and democracy...
...with the end of the nineteenth century as the great preparation: in lonely small towns, prairie villages, isolated colleges, dusty law offices, national magazines, and provincial "academies" where no one suspected that the obedient-looking young reporters, law clerks, librarians, teachers would turn out to be Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore...
...That any Jew in the White House should send American kids to die for the private interests of the scum of the English earth . . . and the dregs of the Levantine . . . " These pronouncements were made just after Kazin had completed On Native Grounds...
...Kazin goes on to call "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" "the single most beautiful thing [Schwartz] was ever able to write, the classic story of the Jewish son unable to escape the history represented by his family . . . But then the memoirist shakes his head and performs a complete about-face...
...That reality was as complicated as can be...
...It was the one work of Delmore Schwartz's life that had the power of a dream, and it remains with me as if I had dreamed it myself...
...Yet not until New York Jew's final chapter does the memoirist really take up again the interesting contradiction of the Jews' strangerness in modern America, which in my African-American eyes—the eyes of a writer whose work owes everything to the marvelous and slippery witness of his enslaved ancestors—was the book's promise...
...It had been taken up by white modernists as diverse as Granville Hicks, T.S...
...Not only did Kazin begin to explain the putative Jewishness of his sensibility in numerous articles and in prefaces and forewords to other people's books, he tried to make Jewishness one of the main subjects of his various memoirs, including A Walker in the City, Starting Out in the Thirties, and New York Jew...
...Schwartz] would never lose himself in that dream of a totally other world that becomes to the eye of genius the only real world...
...Eliot and Hart Crane and the considerably lesser Edmund Wilson...
...The new literature was being created inside an old century—proud, stormy, yet elegant...
...she had wondered...
...Perhaps this unconscious is what turned Alfred Kazin into the kind of stoBOOKS ryteller ex-slave narrators once were...
...The talk was very smart but he made a comment during the question-and-answer period about a "black beggar" who panhandled near his apartment building...
...He has discarded completely the ambiguous strangeness of being a "black" foreigner...
...He seems concerned whether anything he says matters anymore, and whether he'll be remembered at all...
...I asked Kazin why he found the blackness of the beggar important enough to mention...
...Any doubts are swept away by Lifetime's naked contempt for "the blacks...
...He also fails to complicate the second passage (as he had the first) by pointing out the racism of the fleeing Jews...
...But now they were surrounded by poor blacks more than by poor Jews . . . .Brownsville was a foreign country now, a forbidden country to prospering Jews who had once lived there...
...What they wanted of us...
...Modern writers like Wilson represented the American insiders, the occupants of the great halls...
...In New York Jew's first chapters, Kazin frames his celebration of modernist literature with the contours of his own ethnic background...
...The forces of reaction would include the triumphant stranglehold of industrial capital on the American scene, the triumphant conBOOKS solidation of American financial and military power in this hemisphere and in parts of the rest of the world, the triumphant establishment of Jim Crow in the South, and casual segregation in most other areas of the country...
...Though we, too, might find heroes in the writings and the character of people like Melville or Adams or Howells or James or Hemingway, we now know—if we are to make sense of today's writing— we must find out about Bellow, Mailer, Roth (both Henry and Philip), and Sontag, to mention a few, and Douglass, Hurston, Du Bois, and Weldon Johnson, to mention a few others, or Larsen and Barnes and Chesnutt or Morrison or Reed, to name a few more, and in addition there are the Africans and the Asians BOOKS and the South Americans and Europeans: you get the point...
...But thre is also something that Kazin's preface to On Native Grounds doesn't address: the peculiar strangerness to which I've pointed...
...But the volume—which includes notes toward all his memoirs—does little to elucidate the dialectical process Kazin sketched in the beginning of New York Jew...
...How much harder today is it to be a modern man of letters when letters have turned to e-mail and disappear with the press of a silent key...
...He edits books for the New Press...
...New York Jew attempts to tell the story of Kazin's individual life, with a dash of thinking about Jewishness, but with a lot of talk about white New York's largely Jewish intelligentsia...
...Certainly love of modernism fills the many pages of his literary criticism, from On Native Grounds to God and the American Writer...
...S URELY KAZIN the memoirist was not aware of the degree of these antipathies...
...A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment was the name given the notebooks, the last of Kazin's self-remembrances...
...And it is easy to contest the idea that even the new "small Jews" represented "people 122 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 of the past...
...Many examples of this can be found in the long tradition of the AfricanAmerican memoir...
...it would be foolish to suggest that memoirists are amoral or immoral or evil...
...He even published his notebooks...
...He said I should meet him for coffee at a luncheonette near his house...
...Kazin said he couldn't do it "without an Uzi...
...Reading the new collection alone you would hardly know that the tension between Jewishness and American modernism was ever his concern at all...
...Kazin was also very smart...
...While literary critics such as Lionel Trilling spent lifetimes in anti-Semitic academies hobbled by the need to ape the WASPy manners of their associates, Kazin wrote his sweeping history of modern American literature, On Native Grounds, without the imprimatur of the academy...
...Forcing the rest of us against our will into the mystery and history of perpetual victims—Chicago, Haiti, Zaire, South Africa—connected with this race of races...
...Between 1938 and 1942 Alfred traveled to the great halls of the New York Public Library and waded in the new literature, a literature in early flow at the same time as his family's arrival...
...They were also the "Old World" strangers who dirtied "our" cities and threatened "our" racial stock...
...Forces on the side of revolution often wore the same uniforms as forces on the side of reaction...
...Of course, Lifetime's achievement is presaged in the earlier memoirs...
...But from his cross he shrieked the most brilliant things, the most scathing things, excitedly analyzing a passage by 'my king, James Joyce,' and, like a mad shuttlecock, flying at anyone who saw less beauty in his favorite texts than he did...
...But he doesn't...
...This would be fine if Kazin recognized Brownsville's cyclicality: poor blacks wanted to become middle class just as poor Jews did...
...There is something weird about this lamentation for Delmore...
...And I shouldn't try to make him . . . and I shouldn't wish he had...
...they represent the blackness everybody wanted to discard...
...Of course he could not see the joke...
...On TV, old newsreel shots of Martin Luther King Jr...
...For in describing his workingclass family as "black," Kazin did also say "poor...
...In On Native Grounds he writes: Our modern literature in America is at bottom only the expression of our modern life in America...
...And not...
...Delmore could be maddening, but he never relaxed into the full madness of art...
...One could almost forget that he once called his own family "black...
...How can a single tale serve both ends...
...Pound was the voice of the public whirlwind...
...Like the many other Jews who made up America's most massive wave of immigration to date, Kazin's family had barely landed before a substantial segment of U.S...
...Delmore was never again to bring out with such precision what it was to be a marked man, under a curse and wolfishly alone...
...My subject [in On Native Grounds] had to do with the "modern" as democracy...
...has had economic and political syphilis for the past 80 years, ever since 1862...
...But now that the man is dead, and his memoirs have turned into final statements, and the story of this century's Jewish immigration and assimilation has become the stuff of myth—now that all this has happened, it's only right that we reconsider the principal memoir of that group's very faithful, if ambivalent, chronicler...
...Did he tell himself he had to make his memoir "literary" and not a sociological narrative—or a "black" narrative...
...This is where lying enters the picture...
...Don't start a pogrom—an oldstyle killing of small Jews...
...It] was straight, beautiful, haunting...
...They did not all agree, so it cannot be said that there was one modernist position on literature...
...But what interested me here was our alienation on native grounds—the interwoven story of our need to take up our life on our own grounds, and the irony of our possession...
...though shrouded in quotation marks, "our experience" plainly refers to the experience of second-generation Jewish immigrants in America...
...It is obvious that the new literature embraced by Alfred Kazin was, in a sense, a reflection of the America of his birth...
...Small Jews...
...That applause is largely the product of this sentence: "[Brownsville] DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 125 BOOKS was a poison spot on the New York map even to the hundreds and thousands of blacks from the South wearily making it into the ghetto vacated by the Jews...
...The elegance was still inside those great halls of the Library...
...The Pope invited the chief rabbi to the Vatican for a special concert...
...The memoirist's life was, after all, much more complicated than the cover-all description "Jewish" permits, and "Jewish" itself contains many contradictory meanings...
...It makes sense to think of Kazin's memoirs as attempts, in varying degrees, to write the autobiography of a Jewish-American race concept...
...He had this mad gift for personalizing history and for making other persons speak as History...
...For in the American context they also represented an alien force, and this cut at least two ways...
...Schwartz is "Brooklyn's best, nailed down...
...News of the big money had not reached this house painter and this "home" dressmaker...
...Kazin's parents—a house-painter father and a seamstress mother—were not the wealthy sort of immigrants favored by today's policy...
...It could be argued that I am reading too much into Kazin's writings...
...Nevertheless Kazin the writer ignored it, and as he grew older, wrote with increasing hostility about blacks...
...And of middle-classness...
...No one more than Kazin wanted him to write about Jews, and because of his feeling I wished he'd written more directly about the Jewish stranger's road to whiteness and the middle class, and the battle over modernity, and America and its power, for these were Kazin the memoirist's true subjects...
...The book fully, even indulgently, immerses itself in the dream of a New York literary life represented so wonderfully in the very beginning of the book...
...with America itself as the modern ; with the end of the nineteenth century as the great preparation...
...Or his memoir...
...I saw them, all through the terrible war years of the Holocaust and after, in the image of my mother and father—people of the past, living in the past, caught up in a flame of totalitarian revolution that existed solely to keep itself aflame...
...in the emergence of the metropolitan culture that was to dominate the literature of the new period . . . But above all was it rooted in the need to learn what the reality of life was in the modern era...
...But in this passage Kazin is also hinting at a rather murky unease...
...But "Delmore could not laugh anything off...
...Our modern literature was rooted in those dark and still little-understood years of the 1880's and 1890's when all America stood suddenly, as it were, between one society and another, one moral order and another, and the sense of impending change became almost oppressive in its vividness...
...Edmund Wilson, who in New York Jew had a major role as a WASPy modernist who wasn't anti-Semitic, the guy who helps "legitimate" the talented Jewish writers in his midst, barely appears in the book...
...In the train to London, corridors dripping water, a fashion buyer lady who travels all the time between London and Liverpool confronted me with 'your Negroes.' Wanted to know if because of their oppression they are allowed to pay less income tax than other Americans...
...They would never understand this or fully credit it even when they were being rounded up...
...Now I wish I'd asked him why he wanted to tell readers his story and why he thought it important enough to write again and again...
...Even if I had been able to explain Pound to them, my father and mother would never have understood how one man could be possessed by this much belief in himself...
...I leave you with one of the last entries in Kazin's published notebooks: A car bomb in Israel has murdered, burned, several young girls...
...And England has had economic syphilis for 240 years...
...Although the critic's blindness in this regard is understandable, as I've suggested, Kazin the memoirist's steady failure to comment on the civil-rights movement is less immediately comprehensible...
...There is a terrible estrangement in this writing, a nameless yearning for a world no one ever really possessed, that rises above the skills our writers have mastered and the famous repeated liberations they have won to speak out plainly about the life men lead in America...
...The few I trot out on the rare occasions when I discuss Faulkner now go by my name...
...Too often old grudges and a gradual interest in spirituality haunt the entries—his selections and revisions are marked with renamings and out-and-out omissions and self-serving repetitions, the 124 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 handiwork of a cantankerous old age...
...Of course this was the case even in the century's first years when Kazin's east European Jewish parents set down their baggage on these shores...
...Maybe it is God's will...
...This attitude hardens later on...
...Such names piled on each other became funnier than Groucho's J. Worthington Silverstein...
...whites" managed to roll up the welcome mat...
...Du Bois...
...Kazin recounts the details of his love of T.S...
...And I, too, could personalize History...
...Of course, the poignancy of the idea that "even" blacks would want to move turns on their wanting to get away from blackness and not simply poverty...
...WHo CAN blame Kazin for not pursuing the question...
...I will not lie and tell you I remember precisely what he said, for I have packed away his thoughts...
...THERE IS, I think, enough in Kazin's New York Jew to suggest both a desire to use his own life to relate this story of the Jews in America, and a powerful revulsion from that approach...
...Many of the leading practioners of the modern tendency in European literature, after all, were Jewish, and some of the German Jews who had arrived on the American scene earlier had gained secure footing here...
...It was a little masterpiece that used up a man's whole life even before he had lived it...
...Vulnerable to every fresh stab of pain at my back, I feel the torrent of murder, malice, race hatred, flooding me like an ocean of shit...
...ALFRED KAZIN was an important writer to many people because he seemed to shoot straight and without apology...
...She was shot on her doorstep...
...But the Jewishness of the poor strangers mattered a lot...
...have known it and learned to live with it as men learn to live with what they have and what they are...
...Kazin's first gestures toward examining modernity as a Jew swiftly shift into a gossipy discussion of life among the modernists...
...In the opening pages of New York Jew, Kazin informs us that proto-modern Henry Adams was wildly anti-Semitic, and he reminds us that T. S. Eliot wrote these words in After Strange Gods: " .. . reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable...
...I hear the reader now: Alfred Kazin was writing about Alfred Kazin's life, and he was a guy who loved American literature, and he had more facets than Jewishness, etc...
...the name tells us DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 119 BOOKS Kazin knows he's more than a New York Jew, whatever that creature is...
...It had also been debated by modernists such as James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray...
...Eliot, and Edmund Wilson...
...He was trying to tell the story of his life, after all, and in pursuing the question he would have condemned the narrative to the corridors of spokesmanship walked by the black slaves...
...After all, one Civil War was enough...
...Even Ameri126 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 can liberals do not love blacks, enforce toleration for the sake of civic peace...
...It may be worth mentioning that I don't think the contradiction between being quintessentially modern and American and quintessentially alien is a function simply of Jewishness...
...They were New York, the Gentiles, America...
...How did so many allow themselves to be enslaved in the first place...
...The immigrants were in this sense quintessentially modern...
...At the end of his life, Schwartz, he says, was "still trying to prove the injustice that was everywhere being practiced against him...
...My parents still lived in the same Brownsville tenement...
...But I did...
...The debate has usually exempted the memoir, which, although considered a literary genre—how could one consider The AutobiDISSENT / Fall 1998 n 123 BOOKS ography of Frederick Douglass, for example, anything else—nearly always gets read in the light of its most obvious ancestor, the slave narrative...
...Not surprisingly, the big cultural shifts recorded by modern writers— urbanization, for example, and the turn away from Victorian gentility—were simultaneously pushed along by and represented by the new immigrants...
...Just as Kazin in New York Jew left behind Delmore Schwartz and his wrestling with the contradictions of modern Jewishness, Kazin in Lifetime forgets the lessons in victimization taught by the Shoah in his embrace of whiteness...
...I suspect that this tendency in Schwartz's writings—a lonesome inability to cut himself from the web of anti-Semitism, to think beyond the apparent contradiction between his Jewishness and the often anti-Semitic modernism he embraced—is precisely what Kazin does not want his own life to become...
...Even the spacious twin reading rooms, each two blocks long, gave me a sense of the powerful amenity that I craved for my own life, a world of power in which my own people had moved about as strangers...
...And as he grew older and more confident, he wrote about the world of literature with an unashamedly Jewish eye...
...Surely I can say that I disagree with Kazin's typically modernist feelings about art...
...whatever their worth, each seeks to function, after Du Bois's subtitle for his 1940 memoir Dusk of Dawn, as both "An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept" and an autobiography of an individual person...
...With the publication of his notebooks, Kazin did succeed in writing the autobiography of a race concept, and it is the story of how the children of turn-of-the-century immigrants embraced whiteness...
...Keep in mind how in the first passage, "even Negroes, as we said, found it easy to settle on the margins of Brownsville . . . In neither passage are the blacks fellow poor people who share a desire for the American dream...
...All modern writers, it may be, have known that alienation equally well, and for all the reasons that make up the history of the modern spirit...
...Kazin was a son of East European immigrants who arrived in the first decades of the century...
...I tell you how to read, what to think...
...And soon it would emerge, as our brother Kafka had said, that "not the murderer but the victim is guilty...
...The words are thankfully raw, much more raw than anything he writes on the difficulties of Jewishness and American modernism—and what telling rawness...
...I found the man kind and utterly charming...
...And you want me to continue writing about Jews, Jews, Jews...
...Is it too much to say that this finally explains why the "black" in black beggar was important...
...On the contemporary scene, Maya Angelou has produced several separate accounts of her life...
...What does the concluding line of this passage describe if not the modern condition experienced by Kazin and his peers—the children of the new arrivals...
...But this was not a simple task—and possibly not a task that Kazin wholeheartedly embraced...
...Of course, if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom up at the top, there might be something to say for it...
...There is little swimming in modernism these days...
...I, Ezra Pound, speaking from Europe for the American heritage...
...It is easy to see, and share, the joy Kazin felt at reading, reading, reading "the new literature...
...I could imagine my father and mother, my sister and myself, our original tenement family of "small Jews," all too clearly—fuel for the flames, dying by a single flame that burned us all up at once...
...All express a distaste for the unfairness of white supremacism, and all to a greater or lesser degree use their "I" to broadcast that distaste...
...Kazin's contempt for the questioner gleams barely below the surface...
...There are revelations about lifelong difficulties of maintaining confidence and of recent bad health...
...Was he also feeling the effects of this allergy when setting his own memoir down to paper...
...Kazin notes Schwartz's suffering Jewish characters, the Shenandoah Fishes and Hershey Greens...
...That is, it would address the question of who gets to personalize American history, and how the quintessentially modern newcomers faced a battle over becoming anything more than strangers to "the American heritage...
...The point is that Kazin's silence on the matter of the second generation's trail from contradiction to citizen is not simply his own fault...
...There are important films to enjoy and take "seriously" because suddenly much more is important, so that "literature" understood as a relatively small set of books one has been told are important, the consumption of which through some alchemic process transforms the reader into a "cultured person''—that "culture" is ever more plainly not the only valuable culture...
...Let's remind ourselves, for a second, of where to place young Alfred Kazin on the American demographic map...
...The narrow ideas about what was worth paying attention to, and writing about, defined Kazin's vision, helped give it the first-class standing to which he aspired...
...the progenitors of her books include the narratives of runaway slaves, Booker T. Washington's accommodationist Up From Slavery (ghostwritten, it should be noted, by a white journalist), and the various memoirs of W.E.B...
...The weirdness, I think, is located in the words Kazin chooses at the passage's end: Schwartz "was never again to bring out with such precision what it was to be a marked man, under a curse and wolfishly alone...
...And that he had not known of the gas chambers...
...The probable originator's anonymity is, I suspect, the mark of a good teacher...
...In a friend's neighborhood, "Jews who had made it into the middle class called themselves 'white,'" he recalls in the early pages of New York Jew, "and poor Jewish workers 'black.' My family was definitely black...
...Instead he naturalizes this motive...
...In Walker, Kazin's honesty was commendable: We were the end of the line...
...The move into whiteness silently documents a move from the working class into the middle-class ranks of power, the power he craved early on...
...This reaction eventually resulted in the cessation of the wave by means of the racist Immigration Act of 1924...
...He was very charming—a friend remarked that he could see why Kazin had been so convincing to so many paramours...
...ISHOULD RETURN to the subject at hand: the new literature, and Kazin's feelings about the new literature...
...Near the last of the entries Kazin gets more and more preoccupied with the Holocaust and, inevitably, death...
...It was rooted in the drift to the new world of factories and cities, with their dissolution of old standards and faiths...
...In Walker, for example, Kazin the poor Jewish boy both yearns for a place as a man of letters and rhapsodizes over his Jewish home, Brownsville...
...Like all worlds, his Jewish world is made of differences...
...No matter his intentions, Kazin's work gives us, I think, a very good witness to the movement of Jewish immigrants from the quasi-white working class into the white middle class— and the effects of that movement on consciousness...
...He completed On Native Grounds in 1942...
...Note how, in these accounts, Jews who "measured all success by our skill in getting away from [Brownsville]" turn into "the prospering Jews who once lived there...
...Their children went to public schools, which were not as good as some memories claim...
...He was the drama...
...IN HIS literary criticism Kazin never grappled with the literature of nonwhite America, and this failure puts a big hole in his lifelong attempts to explain American literature...
...Walking back into the country of my birth, I felt separated from everything except my youth...
...It was his witchlike instinct for the hate buried in the age, coming to the surface in the Warsaw ghetto and the ovens of Treblinka...
...Let me back up...
...Long anticipated, they promised in raw form the passion with which Kazin consumed American literature, and the unvarnished observations beneath the fine writerliness he demonstrated in works like A Walker in the City...
...It was a poison spot on the New York map even to the hundreds and thousands of blacks from the South wearily making it into the ghetto vacated by the Jews...
...TIMES CHANGE...
...For in not getting out, Kazin's poor parents are no longer "black"— they have become whites isolated in alien territory...
...Nowhere in this book does the author ever mention his family's so-called blackness...
...Setting the backdrop of that dream were the non-Jewish American masters...
...There is, however, a cranial space once called "the unconscious," to borrow a term from the psychologists...
...But the grinding daily sorrow, confusion, bitterness of the black up against white suspicion and fear...
...I told him I love Faulkner's work despite Faulkner...
...Alas, today Kazin's writing, like the yellowing paper on which it was printed, turns old despite the writer's modernist intentions . . . and it ends up telling us a great deal of "sociology" about the Jews in twentieth-century America...
...We talked a little about visiting Brownsville, the neighborhood in Brooklyn where he grew up...
...And of course you are right...
...Leading rabbis in Israel, including the former chief rabbi of the army, say that the Lord forbids the Jews to give up any part of the land given to them by God, so Jews are permitted to resist the army...
...Kazin calls Ezra Pound "one of the original poets and master critics of the twentieth century, the writer most responsible for making modernism in literature part of our lives...
...Even the spacious twin reading rooms, each two blocks long, gave me a sense of the powerful amenity that I craved for my own life, a world of power in which my own people had moved about as strangers...
...Also the smallness of the "literary" pool has been found out...
...I CAME AWAY from my coffee with Alfred Kazin convinced that the man was a gentleman...
...THE ANSWER is impossible to determine...
...In fact Kazin spends pages and pages on Wilson, showing readers pointedly that Wilson was not an anti-Semite...
...we were Brownsville—Brunzvil, as the old folks said— the dust of the earth to all Jews with money, and notoriously a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it...
...Or perhaps the issue is more simple: the story of the Jews is precisely not the story Kazin wanted to "bend" his life story to tell...
...But it is exactly this torrent of raw shocks, of "experience" at its most open and relenting, that tells me it is up to me to write about us as Jews, Jews, Jews...
...He practiced 'irony' as if this famous literBOOKS ary strategy of the time was a Jew's only defense...
...The title was perfect...
...I met Alfred Kazin once, after a talk he gave at a local college...
...Such issues bring us, improbably, to the memoirs of Alfred Kazin...
...Even in death," Kazin writes bitterly, "the Jews were an 'anomaly,' a contradiction to the great `unifying' tendencies of modern life and revolution...
...We were the children of the immigrants who had camped at the city's back door, in New York's rawest, remotest, cheapest ghetto, enclosed on one side by the Canarsie flats and on the other by the hallowed middle-class districts that showed the way to New York...
...rallying blacks in Chicago, trying to enter Cicero against its bigots...
...The book I am most interested in would explore the ways in which Jewishness was an issue for both Pound and Kazin...
...That system is no good whatever...
...We did not talk about what I considered his evasiveness in New York Jew...
...In discussing Schwartz, Kazin voiced the impatience with "protest" literature evinced by modern criticism's dominant, often anti-Marxian, strains...
...Malcolm X, for example, told his classic tale well enough for it to resonate as "the" story of black men in midcentury America, though The Autobiography of Malcolm X doesn't really give readers the precise details of his life...
...Kazin, a child of "black" foreigners, bemoans the loss of his America to black "foreigners...
...I can only guess...
...This America was on the rise...
...In fact, the further he moved from remembering his own upbringing, the more effective is his witness, paradoxically, of whiteness...
...How did so many allow themselves to be enslaved in the first place...
...Some of the most brilliant literary moderns denied Jews a share of America—even of "the irony of our possession" of America...
...It was the greatest fable I was ever to read of "our experience...
...The Jewish intellectuals on whom Kazin reports—and whom Wilson embraced— were the strangers in their midst...
...Most of the narrative is unapologetically "spun" to advertise the virtues of the Nation of Islam...
...The largely poor, largely Jewish huddled masses were an easy scapegoat for some of the many social ills associated with modernization...
...In England a few years after the war, the memoirist runs into a truly outraged antiracist...
...King overheard at one point "I'm tired, I'm tired of . . . Oh, brother...
...Kazin's liberal frustration fixes his place among the whites, obliterating the demographic categories of his youth...
...Often as not these "liars" shape their tales to drive home some larger point, deploying dubious strategies of "self-examination" to get at some greater meaning...
Vol. 45 • September 1998 • No. 4
