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From immigrant Brownsville to the world of the New York Intellectual: A study of Alfred Kazin's autobiographies
Abstract
This study examines the autobiographical writings of Alfred Kazin, a member of the New York Intellectuals. It is my contention that Kazin's work cannot be fully understood without an acknowledgment of the profound influence of the Holocaust on his career. He turned from an earlier negation of his Jewishness to a conscious acknowledgment and celebration of the inescapability of his ethnic roots. As a consequence, he constructs himself as an ethnic American whose autobiographical work may be compared to that of Henry Adams as a document of American and Jewish life. Chapter 1 discusses Jewish immigration and the two literary influences for Kazin's autobiographies: Emerson, Whitman, Adams, Cahan, Antin, and Lewisohn. Chapters 2 through 5 discuss Kazin's three autobiographical volumes, A Walker in the City (1951), Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), and New York Jew (1978). Kazin was one of the first American Jewish writers to exploit his family background and his experience as a second-generation American Jew and transformed it into a synthesis of his two cultural allegiances. A Walker in the City is thus a book about healing wounds and legitimizes the immigrant past as part of a Jewish and American heritage. Starting Out in the Thirties, Kazin's second "personal history," provides an account of his literary apprenticeship in the Thirties, when in his view history prepared to come to a boiling point; however, it is not the purifying flames of the workers' revolution but the flames in the gas chambers that ultimately come to represent the age for Kazin. The final and longest of Kazin's personal narratives, New York Jew, documents his increasing concern with matters Jewish from 1942 until 1978. Although the narrative line is not as strong as it was in the previous volumes, Kazin's comments about the contemporary American scene are worth considering. Throughout these volumes, Kazin creates an image of himself to which he remains true: that of the son of poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants who has made it in the literary and intellectual world of America.
Subject Area
American literature|Biographies|Minority & ethnic groups|Sociology
Recommended Citation
Brinker, Ludger, "From immigrant Brownsville to the world of the New York Intellectual: A study of Alfred Kazin's autobiographies" (1991). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9207367.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9207367