Critic: HELEN YGLESIAS

Source: The New York Times Book Review, May 23, 1982, p. 9

Kate Simon grew up Jewish in the Tremont Avenue section of the Bronx, having been brought there by her young immigrant parents direct from the Warsaw Ghetto, with only a brief stopover on the Lower East Side. It was soon after World War I and Kaila, as she was then named, was four years old. Today we think of Kate Simon as so privileged, sophisticated and cosmopolitan that we gladly consign to her care great cities of the world, designating them Kate Simon's London, Kate Simon's Paris, New York, Rome, Mexico City--glamorous places she has made deliciously intimate to readers. J.H. Plumb has described her, quite rightly, as "splendid, incomparable .... unrivalled in the long, long history of guidebooks," having made of "one of the dullest forms of literature a brilliant work of art."

Splendid as ever, Kate Simon now turns her powers of observation upon herself as a child and upon the sidewalks, the stoops, the public schools and the railroad flats of the Bronx she grew up in. If the words "incomparable" and "unrivalled" have not been included in this context, it's because her history is mined from a vein which has been so much exploited in our literature that comparisons are inevitable.

Certainly a lot of books have been written about immigrant Jewish life, and there are those who would argue that the subject has been done to death. Yet far from being too fully and too often told, the record is incomplete and even endangered by irreparable losses. The extraordinary generation that experienced one of the magnificent adventures in our national life is almost gone before one segment of its witnesses has begun to testify: the women who suffered the violent hardships of an uprooted life alongside their men, and the daughters who strove as hard (or harder, since tradition was against their efforts) as their first-generation American brothers. Young Jewish women, too, battered their way into the English language; like the males, they turned their backs on Brooklyn and crossed the Bridge to wrest success from Manhattan; they rode the subway from the Bronx to the Village, ringing the changes in custom and philosophy that such a passage demanded. Nevertheless, with some notable exceptions, our idea of the immigrant experience has been overwhelmingly shaped by men, to the distortion of actuality.

None of this is put forward in a churlish spirit. The literature of the Jews, when it is literature and not merely self-serving or blatantly commercial writing, is a precious heritage, and no woman in her right literary mind, however feminist in orientation, would toss aside Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Isaac Bashevis Singer; no, nor Hutchins Hapgood, the good goy; or Abraham Cahan and Michael Gold; or Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud, or any of the others who have produced the epics, the powerful social documents, the touching fables, the hilariously funny truths that preserve the vivid scene from which men and women sprang alike.

Alike and unalike, of course. It's because the unalike must be described--for completion's sake, for the permanent record--that Kate Simon's memoir must also be generously and seriously listened to. Theodore Dreiser, in introducing the drummer, Drouet, into the pages of "Sister Carrie," used the stiff and self-conscious statement, "Lest this order of individual should permanently pass, let me put down some of the most striking characteristics..." It is surely in a similar spirit that Kate Simon joins in the work of preserving and recording, lest the girl Kaila permanently pass.

Not that there is anything but great pleasure in the voice of the writer. She opens directly:

"We lived at 2029 Lafontaine, the last house on the west side of the street from 178th to 179th, a row of five-story tenements that ended with a hat factory. To the north and solidly, interminably, along the block to 180th there stretched a bitter ugliness of high walls of big stones that held a terminal point and service barns of El trains. (It may be that my recoil from early Renaissance palaces, their pugnacious blocks of stone and fortress grimness, stems from these inimical El walls.) Across from the factory were a garage and the Italian frame houses that lined that side of the street down to 178th Street. At the corner of 178th Street, on our Jewish-German-Polish- Greek-Hungarian-Rumanian side, was Mrs. Katz' candy store."

The reader is in safe hands, delivered from the dangers of shallow nostalgia or a generalizing sentimentality. One Bronx kid, a girl named Kaila, walking down a street rendered with precise and rich detail, shall yield the truth of a particular immigrant experience. She does--and superbly.

In an early version of the classic loss of identity women suffer with changes of name, Kaila first becomes Caroline in school, than Kate on the street. She sits on the tenement stoop embroidering with the girls; she runs and wrestles with the boys and is punished for it; she suffers the traditional father's strap across the buttocks in the bathroom; she loves and detests her kid brother, torments and minds him; she attends P.S. 58 on Washington Avenue at 176th Street and to her shame doesn't make the rapid-advance class; she is pretty and pawed; she begins to bleed and is slapped in old-world fashion by an otherwise forward-looking mother and then presented with the rags to catch the blood, which are to be washed and reused.

She discovers the library and books; sex in its street versions and its hush-hush home versions; piano playing, potsy; jump rope; ball bouncing and its chants of "One, two, three a-lairy (right leg over ball in mid-air)/ I spy Mrs. Sairy (leg over)/ Sitting on a Bumbleairy (ditto)/ Just like a chocolate fairy (ditto)." Good guide that she is, she explains the mythology of the Bronx streets. She tries to penetrate the mystery of her parents' relationship to each other, to themselves, to her, to the American scene they invade with their passionate hopes. She explores the psychology of her fifth floor neighbors. She invents herself.

Kaila is not yet Kate Simon at the end of the memoir. She is 13 1/2, still firmly rooted in the Bronx but dreaming of flight. Crotona Park is still her Guermantes' Way, Tremont Avenue her Champs Elysees; James Monroe High School and Hunter College will have to do for her Eton and Oxford. She is poised to attract a Rudolph Valentino, to be "as desirable as Gloria Swanson, as steely as Nita Naldi, as winsome as Marion Davies .... like them, invincible and immortal."

So much for sexual liberation--one of the first steps in adolescent independence--and so far, more than good. One waits impatiently for more, for the continuing intellectual development of the woman whose later descriptions of the "Good and Bad Government" murals of Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena (to pick an example at random) or of the operatic nature of Italian street life (to pick another) are stunning in their humanist breadth of information and view. Bronx Primitive is a splendid beginning of the wonderful tale of Kaila into Kate Simon.

Source:  HELEN YGLESIAS, "Also Known As Kaila," in The New York Times Book Review, May 23, 1982, p. 9.