Summer In Williamsburg

by Daniel Fuchs

Book jacket/ In this beloved novel of immigrant life in Brooklyn, David Fuchs speaks to us in a distinctive, affecting voice. He evokes the special, marvelous qualities of the Jewish-American experience by creating characters and conflicts whose idiom and flavor he catches with uncanny precision. This is an exceptional novel about ordinary people. Each of the central characters lives in the same tenemant building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. This single building is a miniature of the teeming, dynamic community of which it is a part. It is inhabited by solitary souls and families. These people are students, idlers, shopkeepers, mothers, hustlers, lovers and husbands. Fuch's vivid, sharply observed prose folds these separate lives into a full-blooded human comedy. The story he tells reveals people living their lives with all the twists and dodges, the puzzles, the contradictions, the idiocies and the wonderful moments. In short, the busines of living, the banquet of life.

Genres: Fiction, American, New York

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

American novelist, screenwriter, and essayist.

Reviews

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

There certainly were some transcendent and piquant moments in this book. But while I know and can appreciate what it was trying to accomplish, I really didn't enjoy it much. A chore to finish.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A minor classic of 1930s fiction. Fuchs had never written a novel before and he wrote this one at white heat, pouring out pretty much everything he thought/felt about life in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. (Part of the reason I read this is that I knew the neighborhood before it transformed itself into the hipster/yuppie haven parts of it are today.) It's an interesting mix of ash-can-school realism--the grit and grime of the city in summer is palpable--and "Portrait of the Artist as Young Man." There's not really a single organizing consciousness, more a gallery of people, but Philip Hayman provides the aesthetic meditations, questioning whether any of it means anything as he observes his fellow Brooklynites pursuing money, romance, and survival. There are brief excursions into leftist politics, but I doubt the novel would have passed muster with leftist critics like Mike Gold.

[Jeff Sharlet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read the other reviews yet, but I suspect I'm the outlier on this one -- those who've read it usually swear by it. I read it after I commissioned a comic about Fuchs by Harvey Pekar and Joe Sacco. Pekar gave this book his strongest recommendation, and I trust his judgment in Jewish books, but I found it flabby and pulpy at times, too caught up in its sense of suffering. A much better book in this vein is Tucker's People.