New York in the Thirties

Growing up in New York during the thirties meant, for me, the Jewish slums of the East Bronx, endless talk about Hitler, money worries of my parents migrating to my own psyche, public schools that really were schools and devoted teachers whose faces lived in memory longer than their names, fantasies of heroism drawn from Austria and Spain to excite my imagination, the certainty bordering on comfort that I would never find a regular job, and above all, the Movement. At the age of 14 I wandered into the ranks of the socialist youth, as much from loneliness as conviction, and from then on, all through my teens and twenties, the Movement was my home and passion, the Movement as it ranged through the various left-wing, anti-Communist groups.

From the chilling distance of time I now ask myself: what did it mean, what do I really feel about those years in New York? And to my dismay I hardly know, there does not seem to be a total and assured perspective upon the past. Annoyed by those who have made a virtue out of scoffing at the generosities of their youth, one part of me would cry out that despite all the fanaticism and absurdity, it was good, vibrant with hope, an opening to vision. Another part, involved beyond retreat with the style of the problematic, cannot help remembering in terms of uneasiness and dismay. As I rummage through the past, all I can find are bits and pieces of that chaos which forms the true substance of life.

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