Autobiographers from Brooklyn divide, on the whole, into two camps. There are the discontented, who yearned from day one to get the hell out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible; and then there are the nostalgics, perpetually romanticizing those great days of spaldeens, stickball, and chocolate egg creams. Martin Levinson's privately-published memoir Brooklyn Boomer, Growing up in the Fifties (2011) is most decidedly of the latter group. But what a thin and disappointing piece of work it is!! Gosh, were we all quite so shallow! Levinson's book displays no sense of life's complexities and contradiction and ambiguities. Perhaps it's because he didn't or wouldn't read — no exciting trips to the Brooklyn Public Library in this sterile memoir. Nor even to the movie palaces.
The best word for Brooklyn Boomer is, I'm sorry to say, superficial. Also padded.
Also unoriginal.
Plus the account of public school "assemblies" is shamelessly cribbed from a 2006 entry on this very blog.
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