Our Country, Our Critic

When so many of his Jewish intellectual contemporaries hustled over to the right, what kept Alfred Kazin on the left?

On the last day of summer, I left my apartment in Clinton Hill and went east, deeper into Brooklyn than I’d ever ventured. I’m accustomed to a certain degree of urban density; I felt an unfamiliar giddiness as the commercial real estate receded and a desolate expansiveness set in. Touches of refinement stood out intermittently, such as the churchlike portico that embellished the side of one of the projects.

It was balmy when I exited the Rockaway Avenue station in the Brownsville neighborhood. I was struck by the fact that everyone I saw was black. In a city as international as New York, I’m rarely in a place where everyone shares my ethnicity. It didn’t take long to reach my destination, a small brick house at 256 Sutter Avenue. There wasn’t much to see—no discernible plaque or marker to indicate that at this address the memoirist and critic Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) had grown up. But even if the neighborhood doesn’t remember him, he never forgot it: It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this neighborhood, once home to a bustling immigrant Jewish community, to the formation of Kazin’s character. Thirty-six years after he’d moved out of his parents’ third-floor flat—when he married the first of his eventual four wives in October 1938—he would confide in his journal that “Brownsville is the road which every other road in my life has had to cross.”

Haunted by memories of his early lower-class existence, Kazin meditated throughout his life on the subjects of poverty, community, social mobility, and what it means to be a minority group member in America. These concerns would embolden his literary criticism as well as his major autobiographical works: A Walker in the City (1951), Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), and New York Jew (1978). In addition to these chronicles, he also published A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996), whose gorgeous title is derived from “East Coker,” the second of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment

As University of Missouri-St. Louis professor Richard M. Cook pointed out in his book, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (2007), “Lifetime is not a book of ‘untouched candid shots’ of a writer’s life but a self-portrait,” with its “heavy revision of selected (and undated) journal entries.” Unsatisfied with the results of Kazin’s pruning, Cook undertook the daunting task of editing Kazin’s voluminous journals, which stretched back to the early 1930s and stopped shortly before the end of his life. The result, Alfred Kazin’s Journals, is fascinating, unzipped, and unavoidably tedious in its presentation of an exceptional mind groping to understand itself and its environment.

Readers of Kazin’s journals will see that he was familiar with baser impulses. He could be arrogant (“I love my worldliness, my snobbery, my ease”); prejudiced (“I’ve always felt instinctively that Latin America is the ass-hole of the universe”); resentful (“I can never lose the feeling that there is some great party going on to which I have not been invited”); and, as expected from a habitual womanizer, licentious (“I am an ‘Oedipal’ case, considering my lifelong fantasies of making it with married women, with displacing the husband, even humiliating him in front of me as I make love to his wife”). That said, Kazin, unlike several of his contemporaries, never severed his proletarian roots and never stopped thinking about, as he put it in 1989, “the aspiration and torment of democracy” embodied in the New York City of his youth.

Kazin was the first of two children born to immigrants from Minsk. His sister, Pearl, was born in 1922. (She also became a literary critic as well as the wife of the famed Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell.) His mother, Gita, was a dressmaker who worked incessantly to support her family. His father, Gedahlia (“Charles”), was a dolorous housepainter who, like his son, was fond of taking long, solitary walks. In the Depression years, he could seldom find work. Like many a father of his generation and background, he inculcated in Alfred a thirst for socialist reform, sometimes taking him into Manhattan to attend meetings at the Jewish Daily Forward building on East Broadway.

In the tide of the postwar years, as capitalism flourished, Kazin would reconcile himself to the vanishing prospects of the United States embracing a sweeping political transformation. In contrast with other prominent Jewish intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, he did so without relinquishing a personal idealism founded on socialist principles. Dwelling on the political atmosphere in his youth, Kazin, in two journal entries from the spring of 1991, noted:

What I can never get over, remembering Brownsville in full, was the sublime, the ever-credulous, the unbelievably universalizing idealism of those poor Jews—so long as they were Socialists…. In my youth, our hearts were touched with fire. Something in our poor old tenement Jewish life, uplifted by the ideals and energy of the Jewish labor movement and the messianism of our fathers’ primitive Bund Socialism, gave me images of value I have never lost.

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