A Walker in the City

By: Alfred Kazin

Narrated by: Steven Jay Cohen

Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

A literary icon's "singular and beautiful" memoir of growing up as a first-generation Jewish American in Brownsville, Brooklyn (The New Yorker).

A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new.

With vivid imagery and sensual detail—the smell of half-sour pickles, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses—Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this working-class community, and his eventual foray across the river to "the city," the mysterious, compelling Manhattan, where treasures like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum beckoned. Eventually, he would travel even farther, building a life around books and language and literature and exploring all that the world had to offer.

©1946, 1951, 1974, 1979 Alfred Kazin (P)2023 Tantor

Beautifully descriptive classic

Written in the mid 1940s, Kazin’s reflection on growing up in Brownsville in the 1920s demonstrates his skills as a writer and observer of life in an area better known for crime and poverty than for its role in nurturing talents like Kazin. The irony is that he uses his urge and efforts to get out of the neighborhood as a vehicle for highlighting his appreciation of life both in the area and “beyond”.