June 11, 2015
Philadelphia Story
By Michael WeingradFor this Jewish writer and intellectual, childhood took place in a "decaying, fear-ridden city" with a mob family who called it home.
The New York Jewish intellectuals had it easy. They may have grown up in poverty in the immigrant neighborhoods of Brooklyn, but the educational and cultural horizons to which they aspired were embodied visibly in the Manhattan skyline just a subway ride away—a clear, unmissable compass point. As for their Chicago peers, admittedly they may have had it a little tougher. And yet, in reading Saul Bellow or Isaac Rosenfeld or the latter-day David Mamet, it becomes clear that your average Chicago Jewish intellectual emerges from the womb as a fully developed philosopher, moving from that city’s cheap streets to its seminar rooms as instinctively as a salmon swimming upstream.
No, the true miracle is the Jewish intellectual from Philadelphia. That city raises no skyward pointers. Tribal, nihilistic, fundamentally anti-philosophical, it is a chaos. In the words of the filmmaker David Lynch, who was living there when he conceived of his cult movie Eraserhead, Philadelphia is “the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable.” No one has ever determined the particular sinister ingredient responsible for this distinctively twisted character—Quakerism? the miasmal waters of the Schuylkill River?—but the talents who do emerge from its deceptively orderly street grid frequently turn out warped. Think Bill Cosby—or Noam Chomsky.
This impression is not dispelled by You Think It Strange, Dan Burt’s brief, pungent memoir of his youth in 1940s and 50s Philadelphia. Burt, seventy-three, is a poet of some accomplishment—a late development after his long and successful career as a lawyer (he represented General William Westmoreland in a highly publicized 1982 libel suit against CBS)—and he resides today in London. But he was born the son of a semi-pro boxer turned butcher in South Philadelphia, and grew up in a family of immigrants, brawlers, cops, and crooks. Burt’s memoir conjures up this now vanished world of hardscrabble, Jewish Philadelphia in a poet’s prose, quick and sharp as boxing jabs, with passages of bruising lyricism.