Leaving Brooklyn

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The narrator looks back on her childhood and adolescence, and assesses the influence an early eye injury had on her life

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Jewish, New York, College

146 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Lynne Sharon Schwartz (b. 1939) is a celebrated author of novels, poems, short fiction, and criticism. Schwartz began her career with a series of short stories before publishing her first novel, the National Book Award–nominated Rough Strife (1980). She went on to publish works of memoir, poetry, and translation. Her other novels have included the award-nominated Leaving Brooklyn (1989) and Disturbances in the Field (1983). Her short fiction has appeared in theBest American Short Stories annual anthology series several times. In addition, her reviews and criticism have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. Schwartz lives in New York City, and is currently a faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Reviews

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brooklyn is the place where our first person narrator Audrey grew up, was a child, and this book is about leaving Brooklyn. It is filled with the insights that belong to a child; you know that when you read them because some recall your own childhood. But there is an unusual character playing a major role, Audrey’s right eye, her wandering eye. This eye gives her a unique view of the world and the effort of her parents to remedy the “problem” brings her to the office of an eye doctor who takes Audrey to a new level of existence. Brooklyn is another major player in the book. Its habits and mores sometimes guide and sometimes mislead Audrey. This is Audrey looking back on her youth.

Audrey had a thirst for knowledge and experience.

Earlier, in an acting class I took when I was fifteen, I saw branded on the forearm of a pale girl a many-digited number two and a half inches above the wrist. I had known the girl through the fall and winter, but only in the spring when we wore short-sleeved blouses did the number show itself. I knew it for exactly what it was, though in Brooklyn we never spoke of those details of the war and I did not read the papers much. It was something one knew, that was all, like competition and death. I felt a twinge of envy between my ribs and was immediately ashamed and horrified, for we were trained, in Brooklyn, to feel shame at every wayward emotion, but I forgive her now, that girl I was. She was ignorant and impoverished. I didn’t covet the other girl’s suffering, only her knowledge; I wished it were possible to have the one without the other.

We see the small things of her daily life, her awareness.

With all my mother’s shaking, a ring of cream still clung to the neck of the bottle; it could not be fully homogenized by hand. Even after milk arrived homogenized, it was a long time before I lost the habit of shaking it as my mother had done. Thus do our parents cheat mortality, for a while.

Love is a part of her life and suddenly it is not. This will be an important factor as the plot thickens.

From as early as I can remember, until I was about twelve years old, I was always in love . . . Sometimes it was a boy in my class; more often it was someone older and unattainable . . . I would see them two or three times , barely speak to them, and spend the next few months talking to them in my head . . . So I was never alone. This being in love, in my early years, felt like a condition inherent to life, like having a body temperature . . . And it never seemed strange that love was always with me, attached to someone ignorant of the attachment. . . And then at twelve years old, just when most girls are starting, I stopped falling in love. . . Love had disappointed me, and I broke myself of the habit of loving and gave myself to solitude.

At a young age, she learns what is important in life.

“Accuracy and speed.” The sort of prayer that, no matter what the political climate, is always permitted in the public schools. “Those qualities are not only for the test. They will help you get through life as well.”
. . .
The girl I was saw warriors welcomed back from Korea with a bit less fanfare . . . She couldn’t know that later ones would be received even more grudgingly, without any celebration . . . we were never again able to claim innocence. We had television, and we were forced to acknowledge what they had done to return alive, that living flesh had yet again been rendered to ashes. It shook us with doubt, which may be the only kind of progress or education there ever is.
. . .
I could not call spirits from the briny deep, maybe because during the first two weeks of chemistry I myself had be exiled to the far end of the lab, which the teacher called Siberia. My crime was touching the equipment – test tubes and Bunsen burner – before being given official permission to do so.

And then Audrey finds a book in her parent’s bedroom.

It was a manual for first-timers. It called the man “the husband” and the woman “his bride.” . . . It was hard to gauge from the book whether his bride knew what her role was, or whether she had any functioning consciousness at all, since the text was addressed to the husband.

Audrey begins to form an illicit relationship with the eye doctor on her second visit when her mother does not come. That relationship may be seen as a perversion or statutory rape. But it is presented as much more nebulous and not easily categorized. It is Audrey’s view that we have for the balance of the relationship and the balance of the book. Depending on your attitudes, feminist or not, you will see the relationship as fuzzy as if seen by Audrey’s wandering right eye. The eye doctor is married, two sons, and in his mid thirties. Audrey is fifteen. Guilty. Case closed. But . . .

But a seed of doubt is planted:

I know that I – she – was not the kind of girl who could do that. In my old nighttime fantasies I had never touched a man that way. I was the one who was touched, gentle, romantic touches awakening me part by part. Even as I recall it, record it, I suspect I really didn’t do such an outrageous thing and memory is falsifying, inventing what I wish I could have done or imagining it from what I have since become capable of doing.

And then at the very end, the very last sentences, after all the fantasies or realities have been explored, we read

Does being true to one’s self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one’s self. . . . no longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions – what happened and what might have happened – come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight.
Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.

Leaving Brooklyn was published nearly twenty-five years ago. No doubt it has redeeming social value. A lot of it. But it also has descriptions of sex that may or may not be true. Four stars and I am looking forward to reading some of her other books that I have on my shelves.

More about the author: http://www.lynnesharonschwartz.com/
More about the book: http://www.lynnesharonschwartz.com/le...

[Beth Lind · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tale of teenage angst and a creeper eye doctor and watching on the sidelines as a young girl learns the ways of the world. Makes me want to read more about McCarthy and that era of communism fear. Audrey was a contradiction of maturity and naivety who is taken advantage of by her eye doctor. There are a lot of things to absorb in this book and I have a feeling that I will be thinking about this one for a while.

[Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ellen Lesser's essay "The Girl I Was, the Woman I Have Become" provides the defense for why Leaving Brooklyn might have been unrealistic by childhood standards:

All of this significantly complicates the notion of perspective in reminiscence. Yes, the adult has a different vantage point. The woman she's become is distinct from the girl she was—in fact so distinct that her hindsight re-creation changes not only the spin that gets put on the story, the residue of meaning left at the end, but the story itself, to the point where the character's memory itself might be construed as a fiction.

Combing through the text of a reminiscent narrative, we can tease apart the disparate strands—the passages where the narrator slips back in time to the earlier experience, and those where she returns to shed light from the adult viewpoint. But on a deeper, metaphysical level, we can't always separate the two selves whose collaboration gives rise to the story. Significantly, at the moment of epiphany for young Audrey, the last time she makes love with the eye doctor, the two sensibilities, girl and woman, merge: "She was me, at that moment. She already knew what I know..."

Leaving Brooklyn considers the confluences of memory. Though as adults presiding in the current time-space, we exist separately from our past and childhood and indeed are different characters. Motives and action tendencies are never fully transparent immediately either to ourselves or our previous versions' to us. To respond to our clandestine origin and to structure this self-narration is to guess, to make an attempt, and even to decorate. As Lesser observes, Schwartz works with this interpretive element of storytelling—most emblematic in the memoir genre—and how that fabrication comes to constitute a very real mode of identity-making to ourselves and to a listening audience. The narrator's admission of intrusion makes san explicit capture of how we go about telling our own stories. In reading this novel, we are asked where we unassumingly commit the same fabrications.

[thewanderingjew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little novel is a walk down memory lane for those of a certain age. Coming from Brooklyn myself, I loved reading about familiar places and streets, familiar family customs and behavior. My dad had his special chair, my mom had a mah jongg group on the night of my dad’s pinochle group. My mom and her friends played in the living room and my dad in the kitchen. We only had four rooms for the five of us so I heard all the conversations.
I loved that night because my mom bought special chocolates, by the piece, from a special store on Church Avenue and I was allowed to pick them out. I also helped her order the food that she served including the wonderful bakery selections.
Mothers, in the time of Audrey, indeed believed the teacher was always right and that school was sacrosanct. They also believed that a doctor’s note was akin to G-d’s creation. My own mom got me excused from swimming because of a chlorine allergy which was really her allergic reaction to the swimsuits provided by the school. They were not in great condition, and my shy mom did not want any males to see my newly blossomed figure.
The humorous touch of the author brings experiences of those days to life. The author is older than I am, but Brooklyn was the world then. Audrey’s was the last family on the block to get a TV, mine was the first. It was a big box with a tiny screen which had a plastic over it. One had to sit many feet away from a TV to prevent being harmed by its emissions. Chairs were lined up and friends came to watch Uncle Miltie. Some time later, it actually caught fire. It was nothing serious, but the TV was dead.
I did not know about McCarthy until I was older but I knew my dad was deathly afraid of being called a communist. Contact lenses were hard and uncomfortable. Girls did not have their own apartment until the married. The rules were different then.
I could not entertain thoughts of any advanced education but at a city school. So Brooklyn College was my choice. I hated sororities. I disliked anyone sitting in judgment over anyone else. There were House Plans which were more accepting. There were Fraternity Parties. Life seemed simpler. Social media had not yet developed, computers were non existent. Life was slower. Maybe it was better to come of age then with trolley cars and neighborhood cops! Who knows for sure…the shadow?

[Chloe Noland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short novel is a coming-of-age story about a girl who has an affair with her eye doctor. I was particularly drawn to it in reading a description which complimented Schwartz on her ability to depict "the solipsism of childhood," a theme which I find particularly fascinating. Although a bit dated at this point, the close-third narration does an amazing job of capturing post-WWII Brooklyn, including the main character's growing alienation with her parent's buttoned-up world, and her sexual awakening in the hands of her eye doctor, which really serves as an awakening to the true realities of the older people around her. This brings her up against her own fantasies as a young child, which up to this point have all been imagined - the affair allows her to finally place herself in her own life, instead of merely imagining it. The mental journey involved in this is truly like watching someone bogged down by convention and haunted by their own imagination start to harbor the power found in true observance of both. There is a failure in this exercise, a sort of futility, that she remains trapped in throughout the course of the book - one of the most heartbreaking moments comes when she is having sex with the eye doctor for the final time, and frames her own involvement: "I had no will. If my body stood up and left, well, all right. If it stayed on the couch, then that would happen. I wasn't involved. I never had been."

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unusual coming of age book. When I first read on the fly leaf and on the back cover what it was about, I didn't think I'd like it -- but I did. The part about the eye doctor was odd, but on the whole it was very thought-provoking, and it's *very* well written. I almost gave it 5 stars, but for some reason decided on 4.

[user061219]

Memoir of a boring girl.

[Kit Sinatra]

I cannot even get past the first ten pages. The writing style is not for me.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Audrey", the main character who is somewhat of a blur between the fictional character and the author, tells the story of her experiences as a fifteen-year-old. Audrey lives in Brooklyn with her Jewish parents in a very traditional and conservative home. She has a wandering eye, and her mother takes her to an eye doctor in Manhattan to have a cosmetic lense fitted. Audrey ends up having an affair with the married doctor. The story becomes a metaphor for leaving one's protected innocence. It also explores the overlap between actual and reconstructed memories. Different writing style; not really an enjoying read; but an interesting read.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a well written book with some incredible areas of the main character really becoming in touch with herself. It was a bit graphic and disturbing on one hand,and a tad unbelievable. So well some of the actual writing was incredibley descriptive and well done, I wouldn't really recommend this to most people.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was on my library's Book Club list, so I decided to read it, especially since it was only 153 pages. I was curious about the themes of innocence, escape, vision--real and obscured, and coming of age for 15 year old Audrey. It satisfied my curiousity.

[Michèle Demoete · Rating 3 out of 5]

moving, brilliant and puzzling

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great read published by Hawthorne Books.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can a book be realistic an surreal at the same time?