a looking glass no more...

While reading Alfred Kazin last night, Starting Out in the Thirties, the same coziness and familiarity, that tug returned for a world less complex although perhaps more difficult, without the technology we take for granted today. Kazin loved to walk, he traversed the entire City from the Lower East Side up to Harlem and beyond. As did Whitman. Their contact with what they saw was immediate, not diluted by an urgent cell phone ringing or text message coming through. Kazin was a son of Jewish immigrants, gifted intellectually and began writing, reviewing books at an early age. He seemed to be at the right parties and places meeting other crowds of hungry writers and busy editors needing talent. Talent was needed-there were no reservoirs of Internet files with names, work was mostly word of mouth, who you knew and how you sold yourself. That is how immigrants perceive America still.
That was the America, New York, Maryland that was my father's world-given enough moxie and drive you could sell someone a bridge in Brooklyn or blue serge suits already out of fashion in NYC. A world where ragmen with push carts called out, fruit sellers pushing wagons cried the daily wares and tenements with laundry lines and 15 people, mostly relatives shared 2 room apartments with tubs in the kitchen and a toilet down the hall.

But my unfounded recollections go further back to a world I never lived in, the world of the shtetl. For the life of me I dont know why. It was mostly hardship in the 1800-1900s for Jews in Poland, Germany, Prussia who were not in cities or who had not gentrified themselves by taking on the habits, clothes and language of their non-Jewish surroundings. The familiar for me is the small cramped apartments where only Yiddish is heard, barrels of shmaltz and pickled herring floated, pickles bobbed in different shades of green, tiny shops of haberdashers crafted black hats and tailors measured wedding kapotas. Shuls filled daily because even with a suit, Jews were not yet afraid to be Jewish and observant. Mothers fussed and cooked, fathers worked and mostly tried their best to cope with everything new and newer coming at them.
My sense of existence is and remains peripheral to that period and there's no explanation for it. It is likely the same reason some people travel to Europe or Japan and feel a sense of home or pleasure. When I was in Egypt,the majority of my time was spent in Egypt's equivalent of the Lower East Side and Helwan on a private farm. Although my mother's father farmed and raised animals for feeding his family, I don't know of any relatives who spent their lives tilling soil, schlugging chickens or milking cows.

Raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, by a successful father in the garment industry and a mother, it was a life without the smell of dank loamy soil, sour milk, closeness or familiarity. Every day meant a new day to discover how to survive the violence and fear. Nothing was the same from the time I went to bed to the next morning. The intermim periods that took place in the dark of night contained slurred speech, yelling, cursing, threats and all of which were never mentioned the following day.
If I asked, I was told no such things were said, nothing happened.

Familiar to me was money. An arguement meant money, running errands to buy cartons of Pall Mall, running to get hand packed ice cream from the Russian immigrants who never learned English, running to buy composition notebooks as my father spent his last years filling them with his life. When he died, I was almost 18 and finishing a first year at Hunter College. When he died it was time to run again, there was no place to stay in NY.

The craving for shtetl began when he taught me how to light shabbos candles, how to say amen after his borei pri ha Gefen, how to make gefilte fish. I never had this desire while watching my mother make spaghetti sauce or shrimp creole. I was pulled in one direction and not in the other. The closest to shtetl life I could find was kibbutz in Israel, but it was too soon after my father's death, there was no time to say goodbye, to mourn, no time to think except to know the money was all gone, the apartment was being closed and someone else would be living there, the furniture was sold to an antique dealer and a plane was waiting for me.

I replaced one shtetl with another when I entered Crown Heights to live among Chabad. The restlessness should have been quieted after being toiveled but the world remained as unfamiliar as ever except in dreams of something long ago and unreachable.

There is a quarter century gap in my life, where I left Crown Heights to attend college, work and the secular world of non-Jews only accentuated the distance between myself and the world I recalled and still cannot find. I returned to Crown Heights recently and suddenly, getting out of the subway, felt as if a stone had lifted off my chest, I could breathe. Nothing looked the same, only a couple of shops remained, buildings were more modern, streets more crowded and less homely, a modern shtetl seemed a peculiar place. The remnants of devoutness mingled with poverty was well hidden if there at all. Hearing only yiddish in the few hours I was there, it became clear that the tiny community I once knew had taken on the world, as the Rebbe clearly wanted, and by inviting the outside in, also had grown and modernized to make a more polished presentation of chassidus. While Jews-even Chabad-market Kabbalah to non-Jews, being shtetl in the 21st century is a disgrace and besides, whoever survived the War had passed on or now remains secluded.

I think, though even writing it, doesnt convince me, the desire to find shtetl is no different from people seeking family trees, unknown relatives, lost family. It is something like Proust's yearning, but his rememberance of his mother and mise en place was clear. Other people have an idea of who they're looking for, some names, possible locations.

So what is clear, is that whatever world I once thought I knew, the world searched for as most familiar, is long gone. It had to exist once...like a looking glass filled with blurred images I have only seen myself clearly in dreams.