The New York Stories of Martin Kleinman
For sixty-odd years, Martin Kleinman has had his eye on you, New York City. Not your stone and steel, but your diverse and ever-changing human architecture. The mosaic of rich, poor and mostly in the middle, from past and present. The cocksure natives and striving immigrants from overseas and over state lines. The mighty and the marginalized. Those who successfully surf the obscene odds and those who are submerged by the currents that flow through you — the historically massive, the tiny and personal.
Martin Kleinman is a short story writer of the first order. He is also one taking on the tallest of all orders, New York City itself. He’s a gorgeous wordsmith who imparts his rich, lyrical tales of real New Yorkers with poetic economy, pathos and humor.
Kleinman came on the literary scene late in life, and the reader is all the better for it — for the wealth of stories his watchfulness and life experiences have birthed.
In 2013 came Homefront, a critically-acclaimed collection of 18 remarkable short fictions from the buzzed-about but unfortunately short-lived Brooklyn publisher, Sock Monkey Press. Now comes A Shoebox Full of Money. It is yet another unforgettable safari to far corners of the Big Apple, one that brings an even more expansive rogue’s gallery of the archetypicals who make New York what it is.
The itinerary for Kleinman’s literature was set by the life and the places he lived. They reflect his childhood and teens in the downward sloping Bronx of the late ’50s — ’70s and his early adulthood in pre-High Line Chelsea and Jackson Heights, Queens. This was followed by two-plus decades witnessing the gentrification of Brooklyn before his re-entry into a very different, present-day Bronx.
A New York long gone and Kleinman’s youth are celebrated in stories like “Kenny Swam the Hudson.” In this, a group of college-bound friends reconnect at the funeral on their golden child friend, the most likely to succeed who went West and hippie in a summer in the late ’60s only to return and meet his end during a stoned swimming in New York’s murky waterways. Another favorite of mine is “A Life, In Cars.” It’s the story of the rising and falling fortunes of a Bronx family, a striving accountant dad and his two sons, told via the history of the new and used autos they owned, from a 1953 Pontiac Super Chief through a 1974 VW Rabbit.
The psychic tattoo left by 9/11 looms large in his former collection and this, notably in the kickoff story, “The Tape.” This story charts a life journey through the city very much like his own, from a Bronx youth to a coming to terms with the horrors of Bin Laden’s handiwork in brownstone Brooklyn. His Rx comes in the form of “the world’s tiniest therapist” and a mixtape culminating with the sounds of salsa queen La Lupe’s “Puro Teatro.” In “To Bake Bourekas,” Kleinman goes Rod Serling and imagines a once distant mother and daughter bonding in their final moments before a world ending apocalypse, in the familial kitchen making pastries.
Several of these stories are thickly spiced with tiny dramas from the New York Jewish experience of Kleinman and his ancestors.
In “Bess Myerson and Her Fancy-Schmancy Mink Coat,” Kleinman weaves an imaginary tale around a real groundbreaker, the first Jewish Miss America, both the pride that washed over her neighbors with her achievement and the internal dialogue as Myerson decides to leave her community to reach even higher. In “Lower East Side Sunday,” Kleinman takes readers along on a weekly ritual for one New York Jewish family. It’s a visit to Manhattan’s Jewish ghetto for a nosh and clothes shopping, all through the eyes of a reluctant son who will watch The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” that evening with disapproving parents. Another favorite is “Mark Lipshutz, Dominant Handball Star, Dies.” This is an ode to another vanishing breed, New York’s tough street Jews. Here, he lays in bed, rewinding tales of his life in the Navy, hustling money on the handball courts and driving a bakery truck as he waits for his end in a city hospital.
Gentrification is spotlighted in stories like “Cracker.” Here, it is1985, and an upwardly mobile newbie to Park Slope, with infant son in carriage, joins a pickup basketball game with rough teens at a school yard court to test his mettle. In “I Just Put the Down,” Kleinman conjures a one-act of an impossible-to-please mother in assisted living and her visiting son, a high-tension meeting that brings to mind The Sopranos and Tony’s sparing with mother, Livia.
There’s a poignant voice and tenderness in Kleinman’s stories, most evident when he speaks of a New York that is swiftly vanishing, especially of its lower and middle classes. There’s a lot of the twin giants of the New York tabloid sentiment, Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, in his work. There’s also that particularly sly brand of New York Jewish humor plied by returning It-Girl, Fran Lebowitz. They’re also a cinematic quotient to these miniatures, ones that are crammed full of evolving dramas and images that bring to mind New York’s most masterful celluloid chronicler, Martin Scorsese.
Both of Kleinman’s collections bear cover art that perfectly illustrate the many sided worlds within, from photographer William A. Loeb. With Homefront, it’s a mutated fire-engine red tenement building; with Shoebox, it’s a peak over a stark black and white graveyard with the New York skyline menacing in the distance.
Once you get acquainted with these two fine works, you should also check out Kleinman’s blog, www.therealnewyorkers.com, where he continues to profile the movers and shakers, small and large, and the moments that make his hometown the most world’s most fascinating. For a true New York experience, follow his website for more info about his public readings at venues like The KGB Bar and Brooklyn’s Union Hall.
