Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick, n NYU freshman in 1946 wrote in the March 30, 1992 New Yorker that, for all their talk of Reich and his Orgone box, sex was pretty much limited for the NYU literary crowd to groping each other at parties in their parents' homes in Brooklyn and the Bronx. She writes of one party in Brooklyn where her classmate made all her guests come in the back door and go through the kitchen for fear that they would make a mess. When her mother returned home, a loud argument ensued in the kitchen. Edward Field in The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag writes of a similar occurrence Alfred Chester's Brooklyn home Chester's mother had confined a group of classmates to the basement of their house then argued loudly with him when he went upstairs to fetch refreshments. Field writes that she ridiculed his literary ambitions and called him “no good” and “lazy.” He was supposed to become a doctor like his father had wanted.

Ozick was from the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx where the Depression had halted development. It was an ethnically mixed neighborhood where as a member of the Jewish minority she was subjected to taunts and threats. Her parents owned and ran a pharmacy but the Depression had strained the family's finances. Her teachers at Hunter College High School drilled the heavy dentalizations of the Bronx Jewish accent from her speech, leaving her "priggishly" aware of the accents of others. She identified two different Brooklyn accents among her NYU classmates: the hurried, clipped words of some and the drawn out vowels and excruciatingly slow speech of others. Like most of her classmates, she lived at home. She studied at a Sears Roebuck desk, a hand-me-down from her brother, who was in the Army. She tore a photograph of a Picasso painting from Life magazine and taped it to her wall. Like most lower middle class families, the Ozicks had few books in the home, depending for reading materials on magazines and the public library and perhaps like many on the lending libraries that rented out light fiction.

The Village was a revelation to her. Here she met people who took literature seriously, who not only read but discussed the literary magazines. With Chester, she prowled the many used book stores that lined Fourth Avenue from Union Square to Astor Place, all of them pretty much the same. Outside the stores were racks of the cheapest-priced books under awnings to protect them from the rain. Inside were multi-level, cramped warrens with cracked plaster on the walls, bare light bulbs hanging over tables of books, rickety, collapsing bookshelves arranged in narrow aisles and faded cardboard signs indicating the various genre. The misanthropic proprietors seated in front, their heads buried in books, seemed to regard the customers as intruders. The places had the damp smell of mildew.