The Kitchen

Alfred Kazin

1951

In Brownsville tenements the kitchen is always the largest room and the center of the household. As a child I felt that we lived in a kitchen to which four other rooms were annexed. My mother, a “home” dressmaker, had her workshop in the kitchen. She told me once that she had begun dressmaking in Poland at thirteen; as far back as I can remember…

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Creator Bio

Alfred Kazin

1915–1998

Literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin was born in New York City and studied at City College and Columbia University. He achieved fame with his first book, On Native Grounds (1942), a critical study of American prose literature from Ernest Hemingway to Willa Cather, and he later became literary editor of the New Republic. His essays and reviews were published in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Kazin recorded his Brooklyn childhood and literary career in the memoirs A Walker in the City (1951) and New York Jew (1978).

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