What I Saw at the Fair

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 20 JAN 2003

Fans of Birstein's work in the New Yorker and the New York Times will not be disappointed by this memoir, which expands on much of the colorful narrative found in her superb biography of her father, The Rabbi on Forty-Seventh Street, and delves deeper into her Hell's Kitchen childhood, college life and experiences among cliquish New York City intellectuals. Her father, Rabbi Bernard Birstein, headed the noted "Actors Temple," a synagogue that counted Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny and Sophie Tucker among its members. After beginning with a wryly humorous segment on her visit to a German town bearing her last name, Birstein chronicles her struggles to be accepted by gentiles while retaining her Jewishness. Particularly entertaining are Birstein's anecdotes of her family, school days and experiences during the 1940s, full of her trademark sardonic observations. Birstein was convinced she'd never be married and is acerbic in her assessments of her young beaux, including one lover who seduced her and then announced his homosexuality, and another who was "a Southern gent scared of Jewish girls but thrilled with them." But singledom ended when Birstein met the highly respected writer and critic Alfred Kazin, an older divorc who transformed her future by winning her heart and thrusting her into the heady world of New York letters, involving parties with Clark Gable, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison and others. Birstein's heartfelt recounting of the writer's life, her turbulent marriage, her divorce from Kazin and later emergence as an influential scribe in her own right will elicit readers' admiration.