Depression Summer in Brownsville
SKLAR, JUDITH
Depression Summer in Brownsville TO BROOKLYN WITH LOVE By Gerald Green Trident. 305 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by JUDITH SKLAR Assistant Editor, Harper & Row; Contributor, "Commonweal" Gerald Green...
...he cries...
...one look at my skinny build and my four-eyed face and he is happy with everything, he forgets all his troubles, he isn't mad, he isn't yelling...
...I cannot accept all that love, if he is going to be angry at everything else...
...Later he seems ready to collapse, talks of suicide...
...You always do...
...He would emulate his father, but he hasn't his father's muscles...
...Besides, you know I have weak eyes...
...The book gave us the whole man, and in turn the force of Dr...
...Just as batding is his father's way of life, so Albert's is not battling...
...Help Pop...
...He too has a crisis in the course of the day: He cannot find the hospital where he has worked for years...
...Albert resents the destructive rages that cause his father to lose patients, his father's preoccupation with his garden, his jokes, his high voice, his unqualified hatreds, his gifts...
...Albert has always accepted his mother's prohibitions...
...he too is a Brownsville GP of stubborn integrity and constant anger...
...Needless to say, his mother catches him...
...Each of them has a quiet, uncomplicated wife full of cautions about galoshes and sweaters...
...He loves him, and wants to be proud of him, but it is hard—the kids taunt him...
...And he is somehow suffocated by his father's love—it is too abundant, too unconditional...
...he would help his father, but how can he bring in more patients...
...He cannot bring himself to fight...
...success and failures, strengths and weaknesses...
...Abrams rushes to a fire and deals efficiently with police captains, firemen, and death...
...Green's new novel, To Brooklyn with Love, bears some remarkable resemblances to The Last Angry Man...
...Abrams has a dark, Indian face, wears a shirt that was never meant to hold a tie, used to teach gymnastics, reads Thoreau, and plants dahlias...
...But there is some question as to whether Dr...
...Today, after lunch, under the humiliating tutelage of a 12-year-old girl cousin, he skates in the gutter...
...Green sets up his subject early in the book by having Albert write in a copybook, under the heading "Things to Work At": "Defy Mom on roller skates...
...and in the most touching scene in the book, Albert sneaks a look into his father's account ledger and sees just how little money there is...
...And he's got 10 pounds on me...
...It's not that Albert doesn't hate, or that he doesn't have enemies, or that he doesn't know when fighting is called for...
...One is almost tricked into imagining that it has the same set of characters...
...During this one day in July, Albert has at least five legitimate opportunities to fight...
...He has therefore never learned to use his ball bearings, a gift from his father...
...Instead he talks, or he fantasizes, carrying on long monologues in his head (a la Walter Mitty) as Professor Albert Abrams, PhD in American Civilization (chronicler of street games), Manager Abrams (of the league-leading Panthers), the Reverend Abrams, DD (reading the obituaries in the New York Times...
...Again like his predecessor, Abrams at one time wanted to be a surgeon...
...Abelman's character sustained the book...
...Albert is skinny, wears glasses, and has weak ankles...
...He is the kid who "gotta bring the ball, so he could get a game...
...Contributor, "Commonweal" Gerald Green once wrote a very good novel, The Last Angry Man, a big, sprawling book that attempted, and achieved, quite a lot...
...Some of his ambivalent feelings are resolved at the end of the book, when Dr...
...He is low man on the totem pole in his gang, the Raiders...
...Yer old man pulls out babies...
...He did not cross the street, for fear he'd be hit by a car, until he was 11...
...This time the doctor is Solomon Abrams...
...He is, simply, a coward...
...The action of the novel takes place during one long hot day in July 1934, one day in the Depression childhood of Albert Abrams...
...Now his mother will not let him roller skate in the gutter...
...It's nothing to fight over...
...Like his predecessor, Dr...
...You win...
...Not fair, not fair...
...He takes one look at me...
...When he seizes the fifth and beats his ancient rival Bimbo, earning for himself the title "lousy dirty fighter," he has taken the first step toward manhood, the first step out of his mother's world (where everything is accepted) into his father's (where everything is fought...
...and each of them has one child who for him is the center of the universe...
...Up to this point, the reader has assumed that Drs...
...Albert thought miserably...
...it's that when it comes right down to it: "Who wants to fight...
...Abrams himself can...
...All right, 1 surrender...
...The story spanned Abelman's life, from Brovo, Rumania, through the Lower East Side, Brownsville, Bellevue, marriage, children, practice, death...
...Beside him, having won his first fight, Albert can finally look the world in the eye...
...It had to do with a doctor in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a GP named Samuel Abelman who believed in work, honesty and justice as a way of life, and who was in a continual state of anger at the entire fraudulent world...
...Abrams' son, Albert, age 12, the kid with the highest IQ ever recorded at PS 133, is also at the center of To Brooklyn with Love...
...Abrams and Abel...
...neither doctor made it...
...The fire renews his strength, yet one wonders if the lapse will be repeated...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 7
