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You Think It Strange
‘Prostitution, gambling, fencing, contract murder, loan sharking, political corruption and crime of every sort were the daily trade in Philadelphia’s Tenderloin, the oldest part of town. The Kevitch family ruled this stew for half a century, from Prohibition to the rise of Atlantic City. My mother was a Kevitch.’
Evoking a harsh formative world, You Think It Strange is an expanded version of Dan Burt’s riveting prose memoir, first published in his chapbook collection Certain Windows (2011).
Dan Burt is a writer whose poetry and prose have appeared in PN Review, the TLS, the Financial Times, and the New Statesman, among others. His writing draws on work as a butcher, mate, lawyer, public figure, and businessman in, among other places, South Philadelphia; the sea off New Jersey; Washington, DC; New York; Boston; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and London. He lives and writes in London, Maine, and St John’s College, Cambridge, of which he is an Honorary Fellow.
Evoking a harsh formative world, You Think It Strange is an expanded version of Dan Burt’s riveting prose memoir, first published in his chapbook collection Certain Windows (2011).
Dan Burt is a writer whose poetry and prose have appeared in PN Review, the TLS, the Financial Times, and the New Statesman, among others. His writing draws on work as a butcher, mate, lawyer, public figure, and businessman in, among other places, South Philadelphia; the sea off New Jersey; Washington, DC; New York; Boston; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and London. He lives and writes in London, Maine, and St John’s College, Cambridge, of which he is an Honorary Fellow.
169 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 25, 2018
Wow. What a story and holy cow
July 9, 2014
This book came highly recommended by influential people. John Burt is a barrister in London who also has an honorary fellowship at his old Cambridge college, which includes a set of rooms - a high privilege. But the man living this CP Snow-like life is actually an American Jew, Phillie born, with a Jewish father and Judaized mother who grew up in a secular, mob-influenced inner city neighborhood akin, I'd guess, to Flatbush before the 60s. This rebarbative, fuck-you-if-you-don't-like-me, deliberately uncharming memoir was written, I think, after he had a success late in life as a poet. The story of his childhood, with parents estranged from one another, a mother from a big Jewish mob family, a father who was aggressive, angry, violent, yet deeply loved by Burt until he decided his father had betrayed him, must sound very exotic to his British friends and colleagues, and one senses that he has told parts of it often - at one point he says that each of his mistresses has had to hear a certain episode that reflects ill upon him before she became his mistress.
One senses that relationships are difficult for him, that he has never been married, and this difficulty extends to us readers. We are being told the whole story in the same spirit in which Burt's mistresses have had to hear it - we have to pass this test before becoming intimate with him.
Reading this book is not always pleasant, brief as it is - but its great moment has nothing to do with growing up Jewish and workingclass in 1950s and early 60s Philly, or about Jewish familiy conflicts, or even coming of age. Its truly great pages are about fishing and skippering small boats off the Jersey shore, learning to know the sea and the weather and what human beings are capable of and are incapable of. His father's fishing mentor, a Tarheel transplanted to the Jersey striper party boat business, is the real hero of the book, and a worthy hero. It is hun that I think about long after I finished - while thinking that the most interesting part of Burt's own story is not the story of the tough kid who went to humble LaSalle College (which we are taught to admire) and then wrote a letter to Cambridge and was accepted (this could be Norman Podhoretz in Making It) - but the story of the vastly unread but deeply humanly experienced young man passing through Cambridge and becoming that most acculturated kind of Brit, a barrister. But that part of Burt's story remains untold, and I suspect will continue to do so.
A memorable and affecting bit. As I said, Burt knew many middle class Jewish kids of his generation who were on their way to Penn and Penn State to become professional men. That was not his plan. But through an accident, he found he could after all go to college, and he prepared himself in a way inconcieivable now: "To me, 'college' meant classical music." Though he had never had any interest in it before, Burt forced himself to listen to the Philadelphia classical music radio station, read reviews, borrow records from the library. That's a bright line between pre-60s higher education and that of the post-60s....
Burt doesnt seem to care if you like his book, or his story, or himself. I'm not sure I do - I'm not sure who will - but there is a cold, Lawrencian quality in his writing that you ought to expose yourself to.
One senses that relationships are difficult for him, that he has never been married, and this difficulty extends to us readers. We are being told the whole story in the same spirit in which Burt's mistresses have had to hear it - we have to pass this test before becoming intimate with him.
Reading this book is not always pleasant, brief as it is - but its great moment has nothing to do with growing up Jewish and workingclass in 1950s and early 60s Philly, or about Jewish familiy conflicts, or even coming of age. Its truly great pages are about fishing and skippering small boats off the Jersey shore, learning to know the sea and the weather and what human beings are capable of and are incapable of. His father's fishing mentor, a Tarheel transplanted to the Jersey striper party boat business, is the real hero of the book, and a worthy hero. It is hun that I think about long after I finished - while thinking that the most interesting part of Burt's own story is not the story of the tough kid who went to humble LaSalle College (which we are taught to admire) and then wrote a letter to Cambridge and was accepted (this could be Norman Podhoretz in Making It) - but the story of the vastly unread but deeply humanly experienced young man passing through Cambridge and becoming that most acculturated kind of Brit, a barrister. But that part of Burt's story remains untold, and I suspect will continue to do so.
A memorable and affecting bit. As I said, Burt knew many middle class Jewish kids of his generation who were on their way to Penn and Penn State to become professional men. That was not his plan. But through an accident, he found he could after all go to college, and he prepared himself in a way inconcieivable now: "To me, 'college' meant classical music." Though he had never had any interest in it before, Burt forced himself to listen to the Philadelphia classical music radio station, read reviews, borrow records from the library. That's a bright line between pre-60s higher education and that of the post-60s....
Burt doesnt seem to care if you like his book, or his story, or himself. I'm not sure I do - I'm not sure who will - but there is a cold, Lawrencian quality in his writing that you ought to expose yourself to.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews