New York Storytelling

For over thirty years, Mark Jacobson wrote what can only be described as apocalyptic New York journalism. He got punched in the groin by Pam Grier, met with Yono Oko in her apartment, studied street corners, and met with Dylanologists. This makes Jacobson's collection of essays, "Teenage Hipster in the Modern World," a travel guide to the essence of New York. If a city can be said to have a soul, Jacobson transcribes it and dictates it like a prophet.

Any review of a survey of a man's work must come to grips with the man himself. One can't just examine the sum of the words compiled in a compilation. You are essentially asked to pass judgment on a lifetime of work. Thus, before stating anything definitive, I have to extract myself with a disclaimer. Jacobson's writing inspires me to write. His collection of work - featured in lowbrow rags like Rollingstone, New York Magazine and Esquire - convinced me to try journalism. In Judaism, the lingo is shiechus, or bias. This piece wasn't written to discuss the writing in a clear and insightful sense. It was intended to force you to read the new compilation of his work. But since I've already given the script away, I can move on to something new.

In a piece for New York magazine in 2001, Jacobson wrote "Signs of the Times." Of all things, it was about the dozens of signs one discovers while discovering New York City: the remnants of stores long gone and advertisements never torn down to feed the lust of free-market advertisements.

To offer you a glimpse of his style, the following anecdote is most instructive: "Asked if he thought the Kentile sign should be landmarked (no commercial sign ever has been, not even the Pepsi logo on the East River, although the now-dismantled Swingline Stapler sign near Broadway Junction was once nominated), Marmurston, no sentimentalist, said, 'What for? It's a sign, selling something they don't sell anymore. A relic... [what] people will try to collect these days just to make themselves feel better about the past, which wasn't so hot to being with.'"

Jacobson's work deals with discovering the relics of the past: the stories untold and buried beneath language barriers, time, and indifference. Though some, like Marmurston, might call that nostalgia, the pull of those narratives compel us because it shows us what we miss when we walk down the street, not what we miss emotionally. Jacobson inspired me to start talking to people. To get people's stories.

I spent the summer in Washington Heights. While I try to avoid "What I did over Summer Vacation" pieces, the city has a different odor during the summer. Not just the smell of garbage rising through the humidity or the fruit splashed onto the street on St. Nicholas. It smells like everyone has relaxed- as if everyone realizes that the only people left share a common fate in the city. That there is no one left in the city to impress. People start smiling on the subway, sharing stories on stoops while the night breeze cools off the streets and kids play wallball against broken concrete slabs or snap the tops off fire hydrants.

I spoke to a local Yeshiva University shuttle driver about religion. I shared my apprehensions about fitting into establishments. He told me about the day he turned away from the Church. His mother, a loyal Catholic for many years, decided she needed a divorce. All it cost her was the ten thousand dollars she paid her parish.

"What does that make me?" he asked, interrupting his own narrative. "Am I a bastard? An annulment. Do you know what that means? It means she wasn't married to begin with. Me and my brothers are bastards?"

Ten thousand dollars back when she needed her annulment was a lot of money. But she was religious and needed the divorce. It wasn't until later though that he became absolutely disgusted with the priests who held his mother's vision of morality so tightly.

"He told her one day, when she asked why so much. He said, 'It's a business.' It's a business? That was it for me... Listen, do you believe that a woman could have a virgin birth?"

I shrugged and said I didn't know. If G-d is omnipotent, he could do anything right? Ala Philip Roth's Conversion of the Jews? He shrugged himself, his eyes firmly on the road in front of him. I think 'The Who' started playing over the radio. "Yeah," he said wistfully. "I guess He could do anything."

Living in this city shares similarities to having a religion. People speak about New York in reverential terms. I personally find that people are either rejected from the city like sinners ejected from the Land of Israel according to the bible, or embraced to its bosom like a child to a mother. Jonathan Lethem's novel, The Fortress of Solitude, uses New York both as the backdrop for the two children of the novel, but also as the very source of their lives. Reading his other works, like Motherless Brooklyn, one appreciates the influence the city had on his life. His descriptions are evocative and to quote them here would rob him of his language. I can't possibly quote enough to fairly represent the beauty of his love for New York.

Another recent book, Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, by another Jewish writer, Jonathon Safron Foer, presents a similar perspective on the city. He describes the legendary sixth borough. His descriptions of September 11th are like those of a painful wound drawing the blood of his city. Jacobson's work is similar, though instead of fiction, he harnesses a form of journalistic narrative to describe his relationship with the subways and streets of New York.

An excellent class was offered last semester in Yeshiva University called Jewish New York. It examined the Jewish experience in New York from the Lower East Side of 1890 through today. It contained everything from literature to census reports. The most dramatic part for me, though, was looking at the old Forvertz building, with the engraved faces of famous socialists still lining its façade. And then interning at the same Jewish newspaper more than a century after Abraham Cahan edited it. New York rolls in your blood sometimes.

I didn't want to write a sentimental article. I wanted this to be a dissection of the nature of narrative and New York. I wanted to discuss noticing things that you don't always notice. To talk to people you don't always talk to. To find stories hidden beneath the figurative cracks of the city. To add some dents to the sidewalks and potholes of the literary streets.

If it takes a class called Jewish New York, or a book of Jacobson's articles, or just stopping someone you never looked at before and discussing religion with him - if it gives you insight into the nature of your own reality - isn't it worth it? If you can feel the city streets under your feet and experience them as a part of yourself, isn't that something to embrace? Essentially, the reason I love Mark Jacobson is because of what he means for my city and myself. He embodies the possibility of letting your love for your city flow from your pen so that your affection is visible between the spaces of every word. And I want that.

This is my first article for the Commentator as the new Arts and Culture editor. I didn't want to do a personal introduction either (add that to the list of things I didn't want this article to be, but turned into anyway). So let me end off with this: To me, Arts and Culture for the Commentator isn't just about writing reviews of cultural events. It is about exploring the nature of the things contained in this article. And if I ever I write something, or publish a writer, and the response is one of confusion, please forgive me in advance. I love this city, and it is that spirit that is rolling through the pulp. After all, what is bred in the bone comes out in the flesh.

Mordechai Shinefield has written for the New York Press, the Forward and is an editor at Mimaamakim. He is the Arts and Culture editor at the Commentator.