A novel about a Jewish immigrant family at the turn of the century -- from Czarist Russia to Brownsville, Brooklyn. This is poet Charles Reznikoff's finest fiction. By the Waters of Manhattan was Charles Reznikoff's first novel, published in 1930 by Charles Boni in New York. Part family saga, part bildungsroman , and part unrequited love story, the novel follows the lives of a Jewish family at the turn of the century from Elizavetgrad, Russia, to Brownsville, Brooklyn, birthplace of the novel's protagonist, Ezekiel, ...
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A novel about a Jewish immigrant family at the turn of the century -- from Czarist Russia to Brownsville, Brooklyn. This is poet Charles Reznikoff's finest fiction. By the Waters of Manhattan was Charles Reznikoff's first novel, published in 1930 by Charles Boni in New York. Part family saga, part bildungsroman , and part unrequited love story, the novel follows the lives of a Jewish family at the turn of the century from Elizavetgrad, Russia, to Brownsville, Brooklyn, birthplace of the novel's protagonist, Ezekiel, a young poet in search of ways to feed his stomach and his soul. Like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Henry Roth, Reznikoff's subject is as much the great island of Manhattan, as it is its inhabitants, struggling for their place in a new world. Milton Hindus wrote, "Both Whitman and Reznikoff are singers and chroniclers of the American island, the name of which derives from the language (Manna-hatta) of its original inhabitants. Reznikoff's title also includes an allusion to the waters of Babylon beside which the prophet sat down and wept. The American Jew, who had been born in Brooklyn in 1894 and whose parents had emigrated from Czarist Russia some years before that date, evidently felt, like the hero of one of the novels of George Gissing, that he had been 'born in exile'. But the reader should not, on this account, be expecting a tearful immigrant narrative, for if Reznikoff was a student of the Bible he was also a student of another student of the Bible, the philosopher Spinoza. From this stoic master, he had learned neither to laugh nor cry but to try to understand."
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Charles Reznikoff (1894 -- 1976) was one of the founders of objectivist poetry. Spare. restrained, and understated, Reznikoff's poetry is at its best when it describes New York City and its loneliness. Reznikoff's poetry retains a small group of devoted readers. John Martin and Black Sparrow Press did the great service of republishing Reznikoff's poems and other writings which might otherwise have been forgotten.
Reznikoff's novels, unhappily, are even more obscure than his poems. Reznikoff's first novel "By the Waters of Manhattan" (1930) was the first of his writings to be commercially published. (The early volumes of poetry were self-published.)The book received critical acclaim but failed commercially. It was republished in 1986 with an introduction by Milton Hindus,a Reznikoff scholar, and has recently appeared in this new edition from the successor of John Martin's Black Sparrow Press.
The novel is made by its style which shares many of the qualities of Reznikoff's poetry. The writing is simple, direct, and restrained. The writing shows a close eye for places, people, and emotion; but it does not shout. The story is told in a sober, chaste manner in which the voice and opinions of the author seem virtually absent. The reader is left to bring feeling and understanding to the written word.
Roughly the first half of the book takes place in old Russia before the 20th Century. Although the story involves a large and poor extended Jewish family, it has two primary characters: Ezekiel Volsky and his daughter Sarah Yetta. Ezekiel wanders from town to town trying to support his family through various jobs. Intelligent and agressive, Sarah Yetta longs for an education which is denied her. She becomes the mainstay of the family when she learns to sew and, as an adolescent, takes on several young girls as employees. She cannot accept the suitors or matches that are offered to her because she feels she does not respect the young men. When her father Exekiel dies, the family discovered his lengthy manuscripts of poetry written in Hebrew --- doubtless explaining why he was at best an indifferent success in supporting his family. His wife Hannah burns the poems for fear that they contain radical political views. As she does so, she observes ""Here's a man's life." Soon thereafter, Sarah Yetta leaves her family to emmigrate to the United States. This first part of the novel is slow but it describes life in Czarist Russia in a measured, dispassionate tone without special pleading, histrionics, or judgment.
The second section of the book deals with immigrant life in New York City. It basically has two parts. Its immediate focus is Sarah Yetta as she tries to succeed in her new life. Reznikoff shows her in the large, unhealthy tenements boarding with relatives and in many sweatshops seeking work as a seamstress. He offers a detailed, unsentimentalized portrayal of life on the Lower East Side. Sarah Yetta meets a cousin from Russia, Saul, who is two years younger than herself and marries him.
In the last part of the book, the focus shifts to Saul and Sarah Yetta's son, Ezekiel, named after his grandfather. The couple are in their 40s but broken and bent from their lives in the sweatshops. They have two young daughters to support in addition to their grown son. Exekiel is a young man of 21 who spends his days reading but does not know how to support himself. He leases a small basement store from a grocer and manages to open a bookstore, selling, at first, what today would be the equivalent of remainders. One of his first customers is an elegant, well-to-do and lovely young woman named Jane Dauthendey who, Ezekiel learns, is part Jewish. The couple slowly become involved, but their story is left unresolved at the end of the novel. As was his grandfather, Ezekiel is torn in the story between the need to support himself and his desire for art and the life of the mind. Reznikoff offers beautifully realistic pictures of Ezekiel's torment, as well as of the streets, bridges, automats, gaslights, parks,storefronts, and tenements of old New York. Born in the United States, Ezekiel is an alientated, drifting young man. His life brings disappointment to the hopes of Sarah Yetta and Ezekiel. "We are a lost generation", Sarah Yetta observes, "It is for our children to do what they can."
In his review of "By the Waters of Manhattan", the critic Lionel Trilling noted that by virtue of the simplicity and clarity of his language and expression, Reznikoff had "written the first story of the Jewish immigrant that is not false." The story is told in an unsentimenal manner without the political preaching that often marred similar works by Reznikoff's contemporaries or by earlier writers. The restrained, subtle nature of this novel is not of the type that will appeal to a mass of readers. But in its understated, poetic eloquence, this is a novel that describes faithfully New York City and its early East European immigrants. The novel deserves to be read and remembered.
Robin Friedman
rejoyce
Aug 14, 2007
Walking and Seeing in the City
Charles Reznikoff was born to Jewish immigrant parents in a Brooklyn ghetto in 1894. His earliest work dispensed with traditional devices such as rhyme and fixed meter. Unlike many 20th century poets, Charles Reznikoff's work is marked by continuity, often in the form of narrative, rather than modernist discontinuity, an almost photographic precision of language rather than symbol and metaphor, and objectivity instead of interpretation of material. One of the Objectivist group which included George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and Carl Rakosi, Reznikoff employed the image through observation and selective detail. There is a sense of detachment from the subject, which reserves final judgment to the reader. Often, the poems arise from Reznikoff's experience of walking and seeing in the streets of New York City, which prefigures Frank O'Hara's occasional "lunch poems." As George Oppen noted about one of his poems, a man climbs the subway, sees the moon shining through the entrance, the world stops and is illuminated. In 1962, New Directions published By the Waters of Manhattan, a fine representative sampling of his verse.
