A Walker in the City

Amazon.com Price: $14.29 (as of 10/10/2019 22:06 PST- Details)

ISBN13: 9780156941761
Condition: New
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Description

Kazin’s memorable description of his life as a young man as he makes the journey from Brooklyn to “americanca”-the larger world that begins on the other end of the subway in Manhattan. A classic portrayal of the Jewish immigrant culture of the 1930s. Drawings by Marvin Bileck.

In A Walker within the City, Alfred Kazin recalls his childhood within the Brownsville section of Brooklyn with such tactile specificity that readers, too, will smell “that good and deep odor of lox, of salami, of herrings and half-sour pickles” that emanated from the neighborhood pushcarts. His story is set within the working-class Jewish community of New York City within the decade preceding the Great Depression, but this classic memoir of the first-generation American experience resonates universally. Kazin depicts his younger self as a smart, unhappy kid who dreamed of escape from a confining local landscape. He found in books the road map to a freer territory. In Kazin’s case, this was once “the city” (“the whole lot just out of Brownsville”) whose glamorous institutions–the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden–spoke of an American past and an intellectual community that this son of eastern European immigrants was once decided to make his own. (And he did, with his pioneering 1942 essential work, On Native Grounds, published when he was once just 27.) Yet Kazin came to remember the fact that the roots he had been so anxious to tear up were the source of his deepest identity. His loving portrait of his past acknowledges the an important importance of belonging, while it affirms the compelling necessity of escape. What might be more American? –Wendy Smith
ISBN13: 9780156941761
Condition: New
Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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