Is There a Jewish Flâneur? Jewish Walkers and the New York Cityscape

• In Event: Cultural Mobility in Jewish Literature

Abstract

The turbulent romance between Jews and New York, the city Harry Golden called “the greatest Jewish city in the world,” has long been a subject of fascination for poets, novelists, essayists, and scholars. Yet the relationship between New York Jews and the flâneur, the archetypal pedestrian spectator of urban modernity, has yet to receive focused attention. What do texts like Alfred Kazin’s A WALKER IN THE CITY, Charles Reznikoff’s BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN, Bella Spewack’s STREETS, and Daniel Fuchs’s SUMMER IN WILLIAMSBURG, all of which are invested in the fugitive life and spectacle of the city’s streets, contribute to the literature of flânerie? How does the Jewishness of these authors and their experiences growing up in the Jewish working class neighborhoods of the city complicate and illuminate the modes of perception associated with the flâneur?

This paper examines the political and aesthetic implications of mobility and spectatorship in these Jewish coming-of-age narratives set in pre-World War II New York. Grounding my analysis in Charles Baudelaire’s and Walter Benjamin’s writings on the flâneur, I argue that the young protagonists of these texts resist easy assimilation into the theoretical paradigm of flânerie. I focus on the narrative opposition between the cramped, over-crowded space of the tenement, with its lack of privacy and room for quite contemplation, and the relative freedom and anonymity afforded by the street. By historicizing these texts in relation to the material and social conditions of Jewish tenement life, I suggest that the act of walking the city’s streets serves an ambition almost diametrically opposed to the Baudelairian flâneur’s quest to “become one flesh with the crowd” and “to set up house in the heart of the multitude.” Framed against the backdrop of the recent proliferation of scholarly reinventions of the flâneur – from the “ethnic flâneur” and the “flâneuse,” to the “postmodern flâneur” and the “cyber flâneur” – this talk interrogates the role of Jewish difference within the discourse of urban modernity, using Jewish narratives to exert pressure on the conceptual dominance of the flâneur in discussions of mobility and spectatorship in the modern metropolis.

author

• Benjamin Pollak, University of Michigan