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. “The whole texture, color, and sound of life in this tenement realm . . . is revealed as tapestried, as dazzling, as full of lush and varied richness as an Arabian bazaar.” —The New York Times

Can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement? There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces a history of the walker from Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city including Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury. As the author shows, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution, and explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life.

How have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? Julian Levinson explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture -- in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman -- led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews. Discussing the lives and work of writers such as Emma Lazarus, Mary Antin, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, Anzia Yezierska, I. J. Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe, Levinson concludes that their interaction with American culture led them to improvise new and meaningful ways of being Jewish. In contrast to the often expressed view that the diaspora experience leads to assimilation, Exiles on Main Street traces an arc of return to Jewish identification and describes a vital and creative Jewish American literary culture.

A fascinating, ambling, loitering mystery story in verse, a whoizzit rather than a whodunit. In this innovative and arresting narrative poem, Méira Cook's walker, a young woman, is a character being written by an old city poet, who is in turn being written by another poet, for whom the young woman, Ms. Em Cook, has been an amanuensis. Always witty and often hilarious, feather-light in touch, the book is an entertaining exploration of serious issues: youth and age; life, death and rebirth; the (dis)connection of language and reality; tradition and the now. It is an assemblage of seven nesting sections, each of them a sort of chapbook speaking to each of the others and rounding out a long poem of great freshness. A Walker in the City is one of a kind, one of the most original books Brick has ever published.

Challenging the standard narrative of American Jewish upward mobility, Wenger shows that Jews of the era not only worried about financial stability and their security as a minority group but also questioned the usefulness of their educational endeavors and the ability of their communal institutions to survive.

Over 40 historians, folklorists, and ordinary Brooklyn Jews present a vivid, living record of this astonishing cultural heritage. 150 illustrations. Map.