It is tempt­ing to call Sey­mour Krim a kvetch for all sea­sons, but the pieces in this col­lec­tion indi­cate that he was def­i­nite­ly a man of his time and place — Green­wich Vil­lage dur­ing the decades fol­low­ing World War II. 

This vol­ume brings togeth­er sev­er­al high­ly indi­vid­u­al­is­tic doc­u­ments of an era that is all too eas­i­ly car­i­ca­tured and dis­missed, show­ing the sur­pris­ing range of views that were pos­si­ble (if not pop­u­lar) with­in the bounds of 1950’s and 1960’s hip­ness, espe­cial­ly in mat­ters of race and eth­nic­i­ty. Instinc­tive­ly drawn to Harlem for its authen­tic­i­ty, Krim is quick to con­demn both the social dys­func­tion that under­lay much of black jazz cul­ture and his white con­tem­po­raries who were even quick­er to roman­ti­cize it. And he was deeply dis­turbed by the debas­ing effect of black Eng­lish on the lan­guage in general. 

On the per­son­al lev­el, these ​“rants and regrets” doc­u­ment that it wasn’t easy being Krim. He was con­sumed by a sense of inad­e­qua­cy, rag­ing with vary­ing degrees of effec­tive­ness against a panoply of lumi­nar­ies whose shad­ows eclipsed his own light, from the Vil­lage intel­lec­tu­al Mil­ton Kro­n­sky to Nor­man Mail­er and Mario Puzo. 

Con­cerns about his own Jew­ish iden­ti­ty pro­vide a repeat­ing bass line under Krim’s flow­ing prose riffs. While own­ing that he is at least in some mea­sure what today would be called a self-hat­ing Jew (“fixed” nose and all),
he does not hes­i­tate to inveigh against Jews who evoked embar­rass­ment (most notably the Cana­di­an artist Sam Good­man, best known for his sculp­tures of human excre­ment) as well as grudg­ing admi­ra­tion (Dr. Joyce Broth­ers). Con­fes­sion­al writ­ing as can­did as this is both rare and refreshing.