When Manhattan Worked

...It seems to me that they most vividly capture the day-to-day rhythm of existence and the nuances of their respective populations...

...It would not be fair to the book or to the prospective reader to try to single out the "best" chapter or the "most interesting" neighborhood...

...The segment on the East Side is typical...

...Kisseloff says he has accumulated enough material for eight more volumes...

...They, too, we sometimes forget, are part of the experience of this great city...

...The constant movement leads to a confusing choppiness that infringes on the realities of private histories, and weakens our impression of the individual characters...

...But they were decent thieves...

...Indeed, the "author" seems content to remain inconspicuous, resisting the temptation—which must have been great—to pontificate, to provide a summary chapter, or to offer a philosophy of Manhattan...

...There is something of George Washington Plunkitt redux in Samuel Pogensky's description of Jews and Italians: "They were all thieves...

...Admittedly, in the case of Black Harlem my feelings may be influenced by the fact that my own memories of it were revived, because I grew up in one of the area's last Jewish families...

...He is able to relate stories of Socialists organizing rent strikes without slighting tales of criminal elements preying upon the innocent, and of the everyday cruelties that people perpetrated on one another...

...It also irked me that while the text clearly evokes the sights of Manhattan, for the most part the authentic sounds of its inhabitants are absent...

...But in his New York, unlike in Allen's, neither sex nor ethnicity is everything...

...New York may be the only worldclass city that is essentially defined by its plebeians, not its patricians...

...We should be grateful for these accounts of selfserving ex-Communists, self-effacing retired black physicians and self-destructive Italian pugilists...

...In YouMust Remember This Jeff Kisseloff not only effectively weaves together widely diverse narratives but deftly copes with the pitfalls of transcribing verbal reports delivered in the first-person singular...

...Within each chapter it keeps switching among people living different lives in different time frames...

...Still, a translation of oral history into the written word that bleaches out native speech patterns and makes individuals speak in a "cleaned-up," flat rhetoric, occasionally has ex-boxers and old hookers adopting an oddly professorial tone...

...By focusing each of his chapters in turn on various parts of the East Side and West Side, Harlem and East Harlem, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Hell's Kitchen, he fashions bits and pieces of conversation into a mosaic that provides, in addition to a record of the times, an explanation for the city's dynamism...

...author, "An American Utopian" Converting oral history into readable prose is no easy task...

...In my view, Manhattan held together during the half century before World War II, despite every good reason for it not to, because of the absence of the sort of individual and collective resentments that now polarize New Yorkers...

...From this tumultuous portrait of wealth and poverty, fame and anonymity, success and failure (especially from the less happy parts of these binaries) there emerges a sense of the paradoxical fusion of culturally intact ethnic and racial tribes...

...Such was the Lower East Side in the 1920s...

...The landscape of the entire text, in any event, is dotted with so many remarkable representatives of all parts of Manhattan and all walks of life that there is little point in dwelling on particular communities...

...I hung out with a nicer crowd...

...one hopes he will follow up his Manhattan work with books on the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and, yes, even Staten Island—that peculiar part of New Jersey culture linked to the fates and fortunes of New York...

...Reviewed by Irving Louis Horowitz Hannah Arendt Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Rutgers University...

...In those days, when people in Hell's Kitchen donated hundreds of pints of blood to save the life of a neighborhood child, there was a pervasive sense of local solidarity and of obligation to the commonweal that has since given way to a culture of personal entitlements...

...Probably this sort of compendium should simply be taken for what it is— part of an ongoing effort at the preservation of memory, rather than historical reconstruction in the grand manner...

...Kisseloff's book nicely reveals the ethos of the struggle for social justice...

...And there may even be something theologically fitting about melding these distinct voices—Jewish slang, black argot, Irish brogue—into one...

...It records Tony Arrigo's description of his first professional fight at the St...

...I must say I am not at all sure how Kisseloff could have conveyed the manifold linguistic inflections of New York's streets without degenerating into caricature...

...Nicholas Arena in 1940, and then concludes with Florence Willisonreminiscing that "the 20s were so exciting...

...In such a work the rich pastels of ordinary lives are what ultimately elicit our admiration...

...Thus we get more than either a demographic report or a demonic search for truth...

...The comparison, though, is not entirely inappropriate: Kisseloff certainly shares some of the filmmaker's talent for representing rounded people plagued by problems of survival, yet nurtured bythe fullness of acommon culture...

...Kisseloff's history of Manhattan from the 1890s through the 1940s creatively uses its neighborhoods as an organizing mechanism...

...Even the best of interviews can become deadly dull when transferred to print...

...He also realizes, of course, that the city is just too complex to be rendered in a single plot or the travails of a single character...

...I confess, however, that my favorite sections are those on Black Harlem in the Depression and the Lower East Side around the turn of the century...

...Jeff Kisseloff is, after all, not Woody Allen...

...A word of caution is in order, though, about the structure of You Must Remember This...