Although I've been greatly enjoying Helene Hanff's books (and will share a little about The Duchess of Bloomsbury later this week), I decided to take a little break and choose another memoir to read that has long sat on my bookshelves unopened. Biographies and memoirs have always appealed to me, but lately they seem to be the only sort of nonfiction that can keep my attention. I really love nonfiction and have stacks of books on a variety of subjects, but for some reason whenever I reach for something to read I invariably pick up a novel over anything else.
I know I've mentioned it before but there is always so much to remember when reading nonfiction, often there are so many facts and figures and interesting bits that I want to keep in my head, but I can't seem to do so. I end up feeling overwhelmed and a little disappointed that so much doesn't get absorbed. Somehow memoirs seem to accomplish the same thing as novels--the presentation of an interesting story. At least that's what it seems like as I read Kate Simon's Bronx Primitive: Portaits in a Childhood. This is the first of three books that Simon wrote about growing up in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. I read Bronx Primitive years ago, but I never got around to reading her other books. This time I want to read all three. Simon also wrote a number of travel works, which I am also curious about.
Kate was born Kaila in Warsaw, Poland. She emigrated to the US with her mother and younger brother when she was four, joining her father who had come ahead to establish a home. This short book is made up of chapters that read almost like essays on different aspects of her life--family, school, her neighborhood, being Jewish. I'm reading a chapter called "The Movies and Other Schools" at the moment and thought I'd share an excerpt as my teaser.
"Life on Lafontaine offered several schools. School-school, P.S. 59, was sometimes nice, as when I was chosen to be Prosperity in the class play, blond, plump, dressed in a white pillow case banded with yellow and green crepe paper, for the colors of grasses and grain, and waving something like a sheaf of wheat. The cringing days were usually Fridays, when arithmetic flash cards, too fast, too many, blinded me and I couldn't add or subtract the simplest numbers. (For many years into adulthood, I carried around a sack of churning entrails on Friday mornings.) The library, which made me my own absolutely special and private with a card that belonged to no one but me, offered hundreds of books, all mine and no tests on them, a brighter, more generous school than P.S. 59. The brightest, most informative school was the movies. We learned how tennis was played and golf, what a swimming pool was and what to wear if you ever got to drive a car. We learned how tables were set, 'How do you do? Pleased to meet you,' how primped and starched little girls should be, how neat and straight boys should be, even when they were temporarily ragamuffins. We learned to look up soulfully and make our lips tremble to warn our mothers of a flood of tears, and though they didn't fall for it (they laughed), we kept practicing. We learned how regal mothers were and how stately fathers, and of course we learned about Love, a very foreign country like maybe China or Connecticut."
I love reading about this period and Kate Simon writes about it very unsentimentally yet quite vividly. I always feel a little like I am a voyeur peeking over someone's shoulder and nosing into their most intimate thoughts. I would be a terrible memoirist as I have such poor recollections of my own childhood, so I appreciate someone like Kate Simon who can tell the stories of her own childhood as if they just happened.