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After visiting the shtetl of Raciaz, Poland, sixty miles north of Warsaw, where my father and his family had lived until shortly after World War I—which I did in 2011—I found myself intrigued with issues of immigration, immigrants, and children of immigrants. I vividly recalled staying up all night reading Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City during my first year in medical school—captivated by that memoir of a child of immigrants. For I too was one.
Kazin by then was well into his distinguished career. He began writing for The New Republic at age nineteen. At twenty-seven he published On Native Grounds , which Lionel Trilling considered “quite the best and most complete treatment we have of an arduous and difficult subject” (quoted in Leader 2011). Kazin followed Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley as literary editor of The New Republic, wrote for Fortune, and published frequently in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. He lectured at prominent colleges and universities, published thirteen books, and became a literary star. But despite his meteoric rise from humble beginnings with an illiterate mother, Gita Fagelman, and a house painter father, Gedahlia Kazin (who he claimed was not very good at his craft), both Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia, he suffered persistent discontent. Neither Columbia nor Harvard would give him permanent teaching positions, and being a literary critic was not as satisfying as writing creative works like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer, and Arthur Miller did, or his earlier heroes, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman.
Kazin's now published Journals (which he kept from 1933 to 1998) fascinated me—for instance, as he describes his struggles writing narrative prose: to allow his own emotional voice to bring to life in his writing