The Capital of Nostalgia : Part 6

Downtown; My Manhattan
by Pete Hamill

(Page 6 of 6)

Many of their nostalgias would be expressed in music. There were hundreds of nineteenth-century songs, in all languages, about vanished landscapes full of well-loved streams, or golden meadows, or the slopes of remembered hills, peopled usually by girls or boys who were left behind. The songs were often calculated treacle written in a cynical way for the immigrant market, but they triggered genuine emotions. With their labor, the immigrants who were singing these songs had purchased their tiny shares of New York. Most saw their children grow tall and healthy and educated. To be sure, some immigrants did little singing or remembering; they collapsed into alcohol, drugs, or criminality. Some were broken by New York and its hardness and returned in shame to the Old Country. Or, if the shame of failure was too much to admit, they moved west, to the empty land Out There, vanishing into America.

And yet . . . and yet, for those who prospered and those who did not, the music was always there. Those immigrant songs were sung in tenement kitchens and in dance halls, and at weddings and funerals. They ensured that from the beginning of the immigrant tides, loss and remembrance were braided into the New York character. Every immigrant knew what Africans had learned in the age of slavery: that there was a world that was once there in the most intimate way and was now gone. Part of the past. Beyond retrieval. On the deepest level, it didn't matter whether you had that past taken from you, as had happened to the Africans, or whether you had decided personally to leave it behind. At a certain hour of the night, the vanished past could be vividly alive.

That double consciousness - the existence of the irretrievable past buried in shallow graves within the present - was passed on to the children of the immigrants and, with diminishing power, to many of the grandchildren. All were conscious of time and its accompanying nostalgias. Events in the larger world often imposed that sense of time. I know a few old New Yorkers who still divide time into three epochs: Before the War, During the War, and After the War. They mean the Second World War. Each of the three periods shaped by the war has its own nostalgias, its own music, its own special sense of hope, anguish, or loss. New Yorkers on the home front experienced that war in a way that was different in the details from the way it was experienced in California or Mississippi or Florida. Other New Yorkers still mark a great shift in the personal consciousness of time by the departure in 1957 of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. Many conversations still can begin, "Before the Dodgers left . . ." Others mark time by the murder of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the event that was the true beginning of what became known as the sixties.

But the old immigrants themselves lived through that one great defining rupture: between the Old Country and the new. That wrenching break did not happen only to others; it was not forced upon them by history; the immigrants lived it themselves and thus made their own history. And their passage would cut a permanent psychological template into the amazing city they helped to build. In the age of the jetliner, there are no more American wakes. The departed emigrant children can now visit the Old Country, carrying their own American children with them, to celebrate holidays and weddings or to mourn for their dead parents. If they can afford the airline tickets, they can show their children the places where they were young. They can show off their photographs of New York streets, New York schools, New York apartments, New York graduations, New York ball games, and New York picnics. This, they can say in the Old Country, is their America. But the sense of the drastic break, of things left behind, remains with them, and therefore with us. Their nostalgias are familiar. They are the nostalgias that every one of their predecessors felt in the darkest hours of their Downtown tenement lives.

Here among us now in New York are the Dominicans and the Russians, Indians and Pakistanis, Mexicans and Chinese and Koreans, and others from what a visitor to New York in colonial days once called "all the nations under Heaven." Even from Togo. Some have moved into Downtown neighborhoods that once provided imperfect nurture to the Jews, Irish, Italians, and Germans before them. Some are settled in Brooklyn or living in newer places in Queens and the rehabilitated Bronx, and travel by subway to jobs in Downtown. Their presence always cheers me; they are proof that in the city of constant change we also have our continuities.

If they are lucky, the new immigrants will get to know New York the way so many others did, long ago. They will discover that the easiest way to know this place is to start at the beginning. That is, to go on foot to Downtown. They will walk its streets. They will recognize its ruins and monuments. They will inhale the dust of the past. They will celebrate living in a place that is filled with people who are not, on the surface, like them. They will stroll with their children across the Brooklyn Bridge and see the spires of Oz gilded by morning sun.

Such experiences need not be limited to the newcomers in the city. Sadly, too many third- and fourth-generation children of the old European migration don't know much about the city that helped make their lives possible. This is as true of Denver as it is of New York. The tale is not taught in any powerful way in most public schools. The culture of television has deepened passivity, discouraging the active search for understanding. But true students, driven by simple curiosity, can still find the places where their grandparents or great-grandparents once struggled for them without even knowing their names. In New York, the student (of whatever age) can enter the surviving streets, gaze at the tenements, visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and embrace the story. In New York, most of that old narrative took place Downtown.

So does the newer narrative. All around Downtown, the new immigrants can be seen today, literally from morning to night. They are working on the reconstruction of old buildings. They are delivering Chinese or Thai or Italian food through snowstorms. They are preparing sandwiches in Korean delicatessens. They are cooking in restaurants. They are taking their young American children to their American schools. And late on Saturday nights in summer, when so many windows are open to the cooling air, the stroller can hear familiar music in unfamiliar languages, those aching ballads of loss and regret.

Copyright © 2004 by Deidre Enterprises, Inc.

About the Author

Pete Hamill started his career at the New York Post in 1960. He is the author of seven novels and two collections of stories, and his writing has appeared in most national magazines. He has been a columnist for many years, and currently writes for New York's Daily News. He lives in New York City with his wife, writer Fukiko Aoki.