My Old Neighborhood Remembered

May 1, 2014
Corman (The Boyfriend from Hell, 2006, etc.) returns to the place he fictionalized in The Old Neighborhood (1980) in this affectionate recollection of his youth.In the 1940s and '50s, the Bronx was a safe, diverse and vibrant community. In short chapters, each just a few pages long, the author reminiscences about playing stickball and basketball, rooting for baseball teams, spending long afternoons at one of the neighborhood's many movie houses, reading comic books in the local candy store, visiting the zoo, trying to learn to ice skate with a friend who wanted to impress a girl, and going to school. Corman was a middling student, good in English and history, struggling in math and science. He recalls with resentment the heartlessness of a few teachers. Although there is a generic quality to many of his recollections, his family life was far from ordinary: His father had abandoned him, his mother and sister when Corman was 5, and he was told while growing up that he was dead. Much later, his mother confessed the truth-that his father had failed financially, run off in shame and even pleaded with his mother to join him when he landed a job in the South. But she refused, and the couple divorced. Corman and his family lived with his aunt and uncle, who were deaf mutes. With no special interests or talents, the author decided to get a business degree with the goal of working in advertising. When he realized that the advertising industry would not hire a Jew from the Bronx, he turned to business writing and then to writing scripts for an educational film company. With the encouragement of a friend, he also worked on his first novel, Oh God!, which he published in 1971.In 1988, Corman contributed an essay to the New York Times Magazine on his Bronx neighborhood, which he reprints here. Lively and concise, it contrasts with the bland and fragmented quality of the rest of the memoir.

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June 15, 2014

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Bronx, especially the Grand Concourse and its neighboring streets, became a destination for upwardly mobile New Yorkers from Manhattan's Lower East Side and the east side of the Bronx. In this memoir, Corman (Kramer vs. Kramer; The Old Neighborhood) reminisces about his early years there as the child of a divorced mother living with his deaf aunt and uncle. Despite his unusual family situation, the author's boyhood featured trips to the movies, baseball games at Yankee stadium, and candy stores, which were everywhere. In those days before the blight of the 1960s, elegant Art Deco buildings lined the Grand Concourse and children were safe in the borough's neighborhoods. Corman's account tells the story of the Bronx as well as of growing up Jewish in that era. Trying to break into advertising after taking a two-year business course, he discovered that none of the large firms hired Jews, a difficult realization for an ambitious young man. VERDICT An enjoyable book for memoir fans and readers interested in the New York City of an earlier time.--Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

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