Sitting on a bench Introductory account

I love movies that choose to shoot in nice surroundings, without history, and without any magic behind it. I remember a perfect scene from a small commercial film, like Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. It takes place on a bridge over the highway. The bridge isn’t pretty, but it’s not mean either, but rather unimportant, insignificant, boring, as if this scene were played out with a different New York (different from the rest of the film, full of false charm), a New York that operates by subtraction (it is neither attractive nor boring) and that generates what that city never generates: indifference.

There are also places that had a legend behind them, a legend, that has fallen little by little into oblivion. Coney Island is one of them. A small beach area in southeastern Brooklyn, the last stop on several subway lines (N, Q, D, F), is famous for its amusement park. In 1938, Weegee – America’s greatest society and police photographer – took a photo of a beach full of people: kilometers of crowded bodies, and in the background, the famous “Around the World” amusement park. Those were the years of immigrants taking the subway to the beach (cheap beach: only the rich come to Long Island) to spend a Saturday in the sun (now in Coney Island under the sun you see only the elderly of the many nursing homes in the surrounding area: a kind of decadent Miami without the malls, populated by old people on Social Security). And then, of course, there was the Jewish immigration (before it became, as it is today, a Russian neighborhood: Little Odessa). My grandmother Clara and grandfather Abraham lived at 3166 Coney Island Avenue. I used to go and visit them, walking along the boardwalk from Brighton Beach to the amusement park. We were stopping at Berta’s to buy take-out for lunch, and in the meantime Clara wouldn’t stop telling jokes: she was serious. Only for a Jew from Coney Island do serious matters become an illusion. Its seriousness cannot be taken seriously. Jewish humor in New York deserves a book or a story, if it doesn’t already exist. Groucho Marx couldn’t have been born in any city other than New York, Jerry Seinfeld was obviously born in Brooklyn, and my grandmother Clara died there, where else? Cynthia Ozick was also born in New York, but her sense of humor is perhaps more intellectual, more nostalgic, and more melancholy. His texts can be read as the arrival of Jews in the new post-Auschwitz world: Jewish (and Jewish) humor in the transition from Europe to the United States, and the emergence of a kind of extreme humor that loses all character of the morality tale. Ozick’s Jews in New York are not beholden to any European-style humanism, à la George Steiner: Ozick no longer conceives of Jews as a friend of the world, but, on the contrary, as an individuality, a rarity, a minority, a secondary language. From this environment, he is able to write the world in its distorted, strange, and contradictory dimension.

I was thinking about this while remembering that years ago, while sitting on a bench on the boardwalk at Coney Island Arts & Arts, I read, while sitting on a bench on the boardwalk at Coney Island Art & Arts, a collection of essays by Cynthia Ozick that I had purchased hours earlier at the Strand Hotel, in which she explicitly discusses Steiner. “You can’t be Jewish and conservative,” he wrote in one passage, which I still think about and wonder about.