The outward appearance and cultural artifacts of the West Bronx were described by Ruth Glazer in “West Bronx: Food, Shelter, and Clothing,” in the June COMMENTARY. Here Isa Kapp takes up its soul, or, as it would be referred to by anthropologists, its nonmaterial culture.
_____________
A New Yorker without too strict a sense of order and tradition can find all sorts of amiable places to live in the reasonable confusion of Manhattan. But it is true, and I suppose anyone with a spark of discrimination would find it disturbing, that many of these places have no real character of their own—no particularity in architecture, in smell, in accent. Even those groups of streets that pretend to be neighborhoods—West End, 86th Street, Third Avenue, Riverside Drive—can show only a few blocks that belong together. At any minute a cross street, an elevated structure, a small walking bridge can crash into the unity: at once there is a new tone, new manners. One can of course find a kind of impersonal purity in the thoroughfares. Park, Fifth Avenue, but only negatively, as in the walls of a bank, which also exercise discipline upon money.
Unique, consistent character has to be sought in the more parochial boroughs of the city. At the threshold of the Bronx, just past a miniature Negro slum and the Cardinal Hayes High School, there immediately emerges a Jewish community as dense, traditional, and possessive as William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, and through it flows a great middle-class river, the Grand Concourse. There is no mistaking even its inlets and tributaries: the waters that seep over from the evergreened fountained courtyard of the Roosevelt Apartments to the modest tan brick of Morris Avenue carry an irrepressible élan, a flood of self-indulgence and bountiful vitality, vulgar and promiscuous, withal, luxuriant and pleasurable.
The assumption has taken root in the Jewish West Bronx that all satisfactions of palate, of vanity, and of intellect are attainable. You can be prepared to hear that the garage-owner’s family, having shopped for ten years at Klein’s and the A&P, will one day go off for a summer trip to Europe, buy a two-family house in a quiet residential district, sell the house at a profit and move, when the fever strikes, to California. The dress-manufacturer’s son naturally gets his MD, specializes; the daughter becomes a psychiatric social worker. To confirm their faith in themselves, and in America’s promises, they become conspicuous consumers of silver foxes, simultaneously of learning, giftshop monstrosities, liberal causes, and Gargantuan pastries. A generous, expansive life! At the same time, a life utterly without taste. The rugs are too heavy, the spirit of the Jewish holiday is kept alive by fur pieces, the frame is always more expensive than the picture.
Still, all purchases breathe an air of not being final, of expecting to be traded in in a few years, and this is, in spite of waste, a hopeful sign. For, in effect, the vulgar, predictable middle-class homogeneity is infinitely mobile, transformable, and energetic. We will come to see that the self-contained stable society of the Grand Concourse makes concessions to its anarchists as well as its snobs, and in either case, to the human need for individuation.
Take that area of gratification, Fordham Road. From the vertigo of the crossroads where thousands realize the deep satisfactions of getting the $1.98 article for $1.89 in Alexander’s, and finding a creamier éclair at Sutter’s, it is possible to escape, four blocks south, to a theater which was among the first in New York to devote itself to foreignlanguage films, Yiddish, French, recently Italian. Mongrelized by its ambivalent cultural surroundings, the little Ascot tried to be refined (was a pioneer in serving coffee in the lounge), avante-garde-ish (flung a bold challenge at the American dream that was daily unreeled under the Waterman’s Ink star-spangled skies of the Loew’s Paradise), and non-commercial (you could go there and constitute an audience of one). On the other hand, the RKO Fordham was the home of the heavy date, the initialled “blazer” and the DeWitt Clinton cap, red and black; while the scrawny, dilapidated University Theater played such old nostalgic pieces as Scarface, Spitfire, etc. It would not be fair to gloss over disparate elements in this borough of universities. Thus it must be revealed that there was a small inconspicuous house somewhat south of Fordham Road on which the signs announcing wining and dining were thought to be polite camouflage. I have never known anyone to exploit this inside knowledge, but the presence of such deception in the middle of the Grand Concourse lent a certain exoticism to what was in danger of becoming an oppressive neighborhood: just below was the region of medical care and funeral services.
_____________
On 174th Street, the Concourse turns eastward, and at this rather grandiose juncture looms the one-dimensional steel security of the Medical Building. The Lewis Morris, once “restricted,” now contains the offices of more than forty Jewish doctors and dentists: in one building, a maternity hospital, several nose-and-throat specialists, heart men, internists, and so forth. The extravagant feeling of personal well-being is reinforced by the fact that this is no Manhattan office building, but an apartment house of two hundred Jewish families of means in the heart of the West Bronx.
A relationship exists here between tenants and the doorand elevator-men (there are, or were, seven) that I have seen nowhere else in New York. The latter share entirely in the general house atmosphere of success and tolerance. They have a jauntiness and natural grace that seems to derive simply from ease, but then they go beyond this, to a quizzical cosmopolitanism, as though the crowding of so many urban Jewish professionals into their four elevators amused them. Every young man with glasses is hailed as professor, every adolescent female in a fur jacket presumed to be a model. The whimsy makes no apparent inroads on the complacency of the tenants, and no joke has ever been made at the expense of the elevator men, possibly because they are shrewd enough to know not only the collective but the special weaknesses of their riders, but possibly for less defensive reasons. A weak but truthful joke is told about the Negro maid in the Jewish household who answers the phone: “No, this isn’t Mrs. Goldstein, this is the shvartze.” The mark of a home where the exterior bad taste is at least neutralized, if not excused, by the interior warmth and fraternal feeling! A warm condescension is no longer wholly condescension: we call it benevolence.
One coterie in the Lewis Morris is more formal than the rest, gives in to the official nature of the house, methodically absorbs itself in its mail riding up in the elevator. But the ethos of the medical building, the real power, resides, not in such individualists, but in one of the most potent of American pressure groups, the circle of gregarious red-faced women who sit from May through October in the sunny enclosure that is reserved for them. Among the housewives who send their children to the Little Red School House, the High School of Music and Art, Columbia, even the Sorbonne, the dominant figure is that of the efficient young matron whose ambiguous expression means, I’m doing all right, the next coat is ordered, the last insured. A smug, not happy face! What is the source of the dissatisfied look that is indigenous to all Grand Concourse housefronts? Perhaps the bile of neighborly competition, perhaps precisely the involuntary community of sunny afternoons, which emphasizes the sense in the participants that they suffer a continuous displacement, that their solidity ends up in the open air. For most of them, having been romanticists in the office and femmes fatales in the hospital corridors, are secretaries and nurses in their living rooms. Substituted for the glamorous paradoxical moment when the secretary lets down her hair, lowers the lights, and turns on Mozart, is the futile ritual of transporting the décor of business into the home. Above the baby carriage, a tailored suit slipped over the girdle, a flash of costume jewelry on a hot sidewalk. (You have to walk at least six blocks east to see a loose cotton dress that wrinkles.) The smug look is the memory of the certificate that meant escape from the office, the spleen that works the mouth is nostalgia for the boss. Their instincts asserted and their great expectations fulfilled, efficiency becomes incongruous. Their only audience is their neighbors. Three or four young matrons can always be seen together in an impersonal, distracted intimacy. In this sort of relationship, one can live for years without an exchange of vital favors: no onions borrowed, and no babies palmed off for the day.
The young mothers are never drudges; in this class, tradition forces grandmothers, if there is no part-time maid, to come and help out. These older women, the aggresive balabustas, sustain a different kind of continuous irritable gregariousness. In five minutes they find out how many rooms, how many children, troubles, what boy-friends, jobs, summer camps, how much education. As for them, they have a beautiful apartment, a talented younger daughter. If she were persistent, she could stand out among her friends in no time. Her son has a good position, his boss depends on him. They have land in Palestine, they picked out a good hill, they can retire comfortably in a few years. But the face above is stolid; no obligations on either side.
_____________
I have already implied that the side streets of the Concourse can neither free themselves from its air nor from its values. At the same time, the Concourse borrows much of its essential spirit from them. The whole character of its self-image is bound up with its absolute middle position: in geography, as a concourse leading from the heat and dust of the warehouses at its southern tip to the cool impeccable suburbs at its north; in possibility, a concourse from Bathgate Avenue uptown to Park Avenue downtown. At any rate, going east on a side street, in the oval that faces Claremont Park, conversation has a style of its own. Here, above the counterpoint of baby carriages, we made our early distinctions between world revolution and socialism in one country, between the authentic Marxists and the petty-bourgeois opposition, and formulated the vocabulary of protest. On Eastbum Avenue we ate our first homentashen and were told that a small glass of homemade cherry wine helps to digest a heavy meal. Here also, in an empty lot, before the sprouting of the antiseptic Lebanon Hospital, you could see between the Concourse and Sheridan Avenue the only weeds, dandelions, ivies, and wild grasses in the West Bronx. On summer nights, portable radios, guitars, sandwiches were crowded into Claremont, Park; and in the spring, a fellow picked up a girl by whistling a Beethoven quartet at her.
The Jewishness of the Grand Concourse, until recently a disorderly self-conscious phenomenon, also borrows some of its strength from the class below, the streets east, where rituals are accompanied by esprit and determination, and no one is vague about the forms. It is true that tradition is mainly invoked through the Jewish menu and the synagogue club, and probably with the most practical considerations in view. But the noticeable thing is the pleasure that exists in continuing Jewish habits. If the Grand Concourse draws upon 86th Street and Park Avenue for its public Zionism, its philanthropy, its flair for organization, it takes from those other streets on the East its kugel, its Friday candles, and its shrug of the shoulder. Influenced by opinion and taste from above and below, the Grand Concourse is in a sense cosmopolitanized. It has elements of classlessness, thus catholicity, and at the same time has the firmness, substantiality, and accrued culture of a definable class. It can both eat its cake and have it.
_____________
It seems to me very possible that the middle cultural position, unclear as its inclinations and its self-definitions are, provides the best breeding ground for Jews as human beings. As intellectuals, as artists, as social idealists, it gives them, certainly, a few hurdles to jump, but with characteristic generosity provides the time and money for training. To a child brought up on the Concourse, Judaism is simply part of his unconscious absorption of culture. The fact of being Jewish is accepted, but without the distinction of being Jewish. He is as innocent of martyric feeling as he is of racial peculiarity and, in most cases, of anti-Semitism. If one thinks in terms that try to impose a universal situation upon a particular person, there is, I suppose, a kind of inauthenticity in all this. Actually, though the Jewish child has not grasped the universal “real situation,” he does understand his own situation, which is urban and disorganized and always subject to his own wit and inventiveness. In his case, there is to be no waiting for miracles.
He is, so far as I can see, entirely fortunate in having a free choice. Jewish manners, irony, music, intonation are in the atmosphere, and he can enjoy them either consciously or unconsciously. If he is to become a writer, let us say, it would perhaps be better for him to study the Talmud, to read Yiddish, to stay home Friday evenings, to absorb and be able to articulate a Jewish rhythm of living, as Catholic liturgies might, for example, be a very important source of a composer’s invention. Since he is, for the most part, not to be a writer, but at the least to be an adult human being, the cultural vagueness in his environment cannot hurt him, cannot spoil his pleasure in discovering Judaism or the Hasidic tales a decade later. An Americanized inauthentic Jewish child, his confusion frees him. His possibilities are boundless, therefore he is more likely to bind himself in a meaningful way, to groups, to individuals, and to ideas.
_____________
The Grand Concourse is very far from the ghetto, and possibly as far from the ghetto psychology as Jews can ever get. Here there is less pressure and anxiety (apart from actual conflict) than in the Palestinian Jewish state. Jewishness is not a calling, a fate, or a challenge, but a usable fact of life. Jews set the norm of behavior, so, as Jews, they are under no social compulsions. As opposed to Palestinians, they are, as Jews,. under no patriotic compulsions. Lacking perhaps the potentiality of unifying and giving form to their tradition, they gain the potentialities of diversity and disorganization. If Gentiles want to know individual Jews, this is the place where they can be known and can deny even such rational, analytical stereotypes as Sartre has constructed. The middle class here avoids Babbittry through continuous absorption of elements of discord. Undigested (but in urban life one learns to use even undigested elements), they initiate the ferment that creates a perpetual vivacity.
In the neighborhoods where Jewry has for many years been able to take its existence for granted, and to live an undefensive middle-class life, I think it is the older, European generation that has better exploited its freedom. We have seen in this generation a blurring of fanaticism, an adaptability, that is able to stand even the breaking away of its children. The latter, rigidly associating their homes with conservatism, parochialism, and repression, have been provincialized by their own revolt, sometimes going so far as to look for moderation and gentility in non-Jewish life only. They have been amazed years later to find their parents self-consciously “progressive,” self-educated, wry, mannerly, and even, having got wind of modern psychology, embarrassingly over-considerate.
But what the children will never forgive their flexible parents are the stage sets of their childhood. The parent includes his home in a sweeping casual gesture of success, and then forgets about it; but to the child, the old rooms, the mirror that covers a whole wall, the painting that shows up well above the credenza, are like sore gums that he will never stop poking. The parent has resigned himself to his faith that public assertion of prosperity must come, in cities, at the expense of Gemütlichkeit. What Grand Concourse home knows anymore this European, pre-middle-class quality? The streets are lost to them. Instead they cultivate interiors, and the principle of display drives out the principle of pleasure. How many Concourse bedrooms are suffocated by flowered wallpaper, the Kitsch of domestic culture; how many windows blotted out with Venetian blinds, the somber instruments of urban privacy. The “living” room receives its sagging prop of barrel chairs, mahogany servers, cut crystals. In the spring, a housewife’s fancy turns to chintz drapes with figures of birds and enormous roses.
Eccentric, spontaneous taste effaces itself before the dignified concept of a “set,” that dreadful harmony of a single wood, a single century’s notions. Between the 20’s and the 40’s, colors and lines may have changed, but the urge to unity remains. If through a whole apartment you notice, with slight variations, a disturbing relationship among all the lamps, you find out it was a deliberate maneuver: they are all “Japanese Modem.” The mushroom-pink of the Degas sleeve “plays up” the mauve in the rug.
It becomes the extreme imaginative luxury to go from such homes into those where pieces of furniture are chosen singly, because of the limitation of money or because someone has been unreasonably lured by an odd shape or a pronounced grain of wood; to substitute for the heavy completeness of the Concourse even a capricious, uninformed vulgarity. But in the very atmosphere where possessions have come to mean so much and indicate so much, they are most impersonally acquired. The prepossessing family succumbs to the ultimate degradation of calling in the interior decorator (she gets a twenty-five percent discount on the fabrics) to match the drapes to the sofa ruffle, the kitchen oilcloth to the shelving.
_____________
Behind their massive pieces, these bourgeois are hard to confound. Ingenuousness is a quality they have lost. A kind of lumbering sophistication operates for them in sexual matters at well as in politics. Here, Marx is neither a shock nor a mystery, nor, to be sure, very much of a historic figure. So, too, this is perhaps the only kind of Jewish home in which jokes about virginity and contraception can be exchanged between fathers and daughters. Such early sophistication has, of course, very little to do with an attitude of simplicity or pleasure toward sexual experience. It assumes, on the contrary, the existence of insidious appetites which cannot be gratified. The joke, in fact, lies precisely in the frustration. Out of the homes where the vocabulary of sexual banter is breezily absorbed and flaunted, come emancipated, excitable, prudish adolescents who are able to discuss “orgies of petting” in the most academic way, and to develop prejudices that strike midway between the stag dinner and the social worker’s brochure. If the children finally come to think in a more natural way, the knowing parents then impose an implicit protocol of silence. The vocabulary for sexual enjoyment is sparse.
On the surface, the Concourse milieu would seem to be a natural enemy of the instincts, and of taste, but in practice it is, by the greater profusion of its minerals, and by its density, likelier ground for creativity than the looser, more conscientiously watered soil of Greenwich Village. In its aesthetic clutter, lies the potentiality of strong individual opinion. Where good taste is an assumption, as often as not, evasiveness is bred, and a tactful neutrality that is habitual and mechanical. In these homes on the Grand Concourse, tact has to be relearned, as does taste, thus there is no danger of relaxed alertness.
In spite of oppressive elements, the final effect of the middle-class home is not a stifling one. We must make a distinction between the suspicious hostility toward unfamiliar ideas and manners in the lower middle-class home, which is conservative, and the humorous condescension of the older generation’s “You’ll agree with me ten years from now” along the Grand Concourse. The first paralyzes, the second provokes. To the first you continue to make the irritable compulsive concessions that create inward hysteria; to the second, no concessions are possible, necessary, or seriously expected. In fact, left dissatisfied and unrealized by their work, rather than debilitated, Concourse parents seek and appreciate any kind of stimulation. They are challenged, rather than overawed or puzzled, by their children. It must be remembered that en route to the Grand Concourse apartment, they stopped off at one of the side-streets to the east. Therefore, ten years from now, if their children should really be ready to agree with them, chances are that they will be the ones to protest.
_____________
