Books: Maiden Voyage

BRONX PRIMITIVE: PORTRAITS IN A CHILDHOOD by Kate Simon Viking; 179 pages; $13.95

The setting of Bronx Primitive seems strange turf for the Yankee Clipper of the travel book (New York, Places and Pleasures; England’s Green and Pleasant Land). In fact, she is at home in every sense. Kate is not short for Katherine but an alteration of Kaila, the name her Polish-Jewish parents gave her when she was born in Warsaw nearly 70 years ago. Simon took her first trip at age four, in steerage, aboard the Susquehanna, bound for New York City. There she grew up in neighborhoods where English had many accents.

Another tenement symphony full of Cohens and Kellys, bubbling chicken soup and the sound of young Rachmani-noffs practicing scales? Simon is not ashamed of a well-timed note of nostalgia, but her memoir of girlhood in the South Bronx during the 1920s will be remembered for its discordances. Being part of the Old World and female is something the author cannot forget or forgive. Beneath its iridescent surface, her book is a hard, unsentimental look at a sort of “World of Our Mothers,” a place of unwanted pregnancies, illegal abortions, abandonments and the desolate sense that a husband often felt more concern for newly arrived cousins than for his wife and children.

“Girls’ prayers,” writes Simon, ”counted for nothing; like animals, they had no souls and no voices to God’s ear.” Barely out of rompers herself, Kate must care for her younger brother. Later, she is forced to tend a baby sister so her brother can run off to play: “While he, the grasshopper, sang and danced, I, the ant, sat demurely rocking the carriage. He was in the full sun, I in the shade; he was young, I was old.”

Piano lessons are compulsory. Sex education is an accelerated course in child abuse: a newly arrived immigrant cousin spends himself on Kate’s leg; an avuncular friend of her family’s gropes her at the movies, and a barber’s free hand wanders under the sheet. Years later, Mamma tells her daughter that she had 13 abortions. It was not a neighborhood record.

Yet the author’s South Bronx was not a sinkhole of poverty and despair. In fact, the neighborhood was a big step up from the Lower East Side. Pappa was a skilled shoemaker who made prototypes of new designs. Mamma was known as “the Princess” because she refused to appear on the street in a housedress. She also had a part-time job and unconventional advice for her daughter: “Don’t get married, at least not until you can support yourself and make a careful choice. Or don’t get married at all, better still.”

For the record, the author eventually went to college and became a successful writer. These facts are not part of Bronx Primitive. It ends with Kate, a budding beauty, ready to take on the male animal in her first form-fitted dress. “Lolita,” she says, “was born decades later, yet [she was] a twin of the thirteen-and-a-half-year-old striding through Crotona Park, passing the spiky red flowers toward a kingdom of mesmerized men.” The reference to Nabokov’s lollipop avenger is especially suggestive because Simon’s book is reminiscent of the Russian master’s own recollections of childhood, Speak, Memory. Both books play magic tricks on time; both end with a voyage about to begin; and both leave the reader anxious to sign on for more.

— By R. Z. Sheppard