High life | 20 November 2010

Tony Judt was a very clever and learned Brit who taught in the Big Bagel and who died last August of that dreaded Lou Gehrig disease. He was extremely brave until the end, writing and lecturing from his wheelchair, and so convincing was he that some nice guys managed to ban him from speaking just before the end because of his opposition to Israeli policies. (They called him an anti-Semite, although Judt was Jewish, which is par for the course.)

Judt wrote an essay about ‘My endless New York’, which was a gem. At times I think only foreigners can catch the city’s pulse, New York, of course, not being America. A homogeneous quality is not what the city is made of. The finest thing about the place, we are told, is the variety of its sideshows. Sixty-five years or so ago, A.J. Liebling spoke for the city, writing about boxing and the man who laid out the gloves and headgear for the pugs at Stillman’s gym, or Hymie the Jew who operated sleazy clubs on 52nd street, or Miss Ira, ‘the Harlem modiste’ who sold turbans to ladies who liked to impress the men late at night.

Liebling insisted that there existed New Yorkers so submerged in one environment, such as the garment centre or Jack and Charlie’s, that they lived and died oblivious of the other worlds around them. I agree. I caught some of that separate world as a teenager, the Park Avenue swells who never ventured anywhere except to their clubs, and for weekends on Long Island, even when slumming; the Italians and Irish who lived side-by-side on the Lower East Side and in Hell’s Kitchen and who did manual work and went to baseball games on Saturdays and to church on Sundays; the rich ‘Negroes’ up in Harlem who never ventured south but lived in some splendid houses with beautiful women and were said to be gangsters; the Jews on 47th street, the diamond district, who were suspicious of the rest of us and probably had good reason to be.