Free New York in the '50s by Dan Wakefield Page A

York.”
    On her first day at Barnard, at a tea for incoming freshmen, Marion met a student who came from the Midwest and had gone to an Episcopal boarding school. “She’d never seen a Jew before,” Marion recalls. “There was a mutual fascination between us. She’d recite the names of her relatives—American names—and I’d give her back names of my relatives from Russian Jewry. It was a fructifying encounter, a much more crucial kind than the European-American encounter. Now it’s become a syndrome, a reigning cliché, like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. You can’t live it now without knowing you’re some kind of social phenomenon, but then it was unmapped terrain. It was like embarking on a voyage of discovery.”
    This cultural voyage of discovery led me to a real voyage to Israel shortly after college, where I sent dispatches to The Nation and traveled the country from Eilat to Haifa, working on kibbutzim as a shepherd, a hay pitcher, and a fruit picker. I talked late into the night with a couple my own age who lived on a kibbutz near the Dead Sea, hearing the husband’s explanation of coming to Israel as a reaction to his sense of isolation as a Jew when he walked through the Christmas-lit streets of Manhattan, knowing he was outside all that. Yes, I said, for I too had felt outside, and I felt a kinship with this young guy, and his country.
    On one of my walks down Broadway with Sam Astrachan after he had told me my story failed to get The Columbia Review prize, I said something rueful and self-deprecating that he especially appreciated. It made him laugh, and he stopped walking and put his arm around my shoulder with brotherly affection.
    â€œWakefield,” he said, “you’re a Jew.”
    I smiled, feeling proud and elated. The illumination from a streetlight on one side and the glow from the plate glass window of a Rikers late-night restaurant on the other made a pool of light where we stood in the middle of the sidewalk. There was a warmth about the moment, a festive aura. I felt, at last, I had graduated.

THREE
    Getting Started
    FIRST JOBS
    I couldn’t get past the receptionists. When I went on my job search after college, the receptionists who barred my way from interviews at New York’s great newspapers blended together into one gorgon-like image: a grim woman with a beehive hairdo wearing cat’s-eye glasses studded with rhinestones, her red lips pursed in disapproval and rejection. Clutching the manila envelope of clippings I had published in my summer jobs at the Indianapolis Star and the Grand Rapids Press , I slunk away in dejection. I’d thought this would be a snap.
    After all, one of my stories in the Press had drawn the managing editor himself out of his office to make a rare appearance in the city room. The legendary M. M. “Crow” Kesterson (it was whispered that his initials stood for Montmorency Maximilian, but one did not address him as such), who wore a neatly pointed gray mustache and sleeve garters, à la the editors from the golden age of journalism, shook my hand as he praised the lead of my feature on a woman who planted rosebushes in her garden that multiplied into more rosebushes. My opening sentence was “A rosebush is a rosebush is a rosebush in the garden of Mrs. Henry Frampton of 2245 Euclid Avenue.” As he grasped my hand firmly in his own, Kesterson said,“Congratulations. You are the first person to ever get Gertrude Stein into the pages of the Grand Rapids Press .”
    How could I fail to make it in New York?
    Now I had another question. How could I hope to land a job if I couldn’t even get past the receptionists? In desperation, I called home—not my parents but my favorite high school teachers. Jean Grubb, the journalism teacher who got me my first professional job, as our high school sports correspondent for the Indianapolis Star , had no contacts in New York. Nor