The Brooklyn of popular mythology is the absurd home of the Brooklyn Dodgers (now of Los Angeles), Coney Island and the famous bridge; the accent is funny, the people eccentric, the whole atmosphere as fabulous as Texas. Of course, anyone growing up in Brooklyn would find it hard to recognize himself or his borough in the myth. Brooklyn is a special place, but not for the mythological reasons given above. Not like Texas which is so American in its wide-open spaces, but, one imagines, like the East European shtetl on a macrocosmic scale: dense, airless, desperate. This was even truer thirty years ago before the influx from Puerto Rico, but the East European character of Brownsville or Williamsburg is essentially unmodified. Or, so it seems on every trip from “the city” : one simply returns to one's past.

So that in reading these novels about Williamsburg (Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt and Low Company, first published in '34, '36 and '37 respectively), one almost forgets that Daniel Fuchs is writing about an earlier time. The choking density of life in Williamsburg, the airlessness of street and apartment, the impossibility of privacy or anonymity in the tenement, the consequent irritability and tension of human relationships: Fuchs has given us the timeless “spirit of the place.” In upper Brownsville people still seek the clearer luft of Eastern Parkway on a torrid summer night, as if they were ritualistically repeating the flight from the Old Country.