Daniel Fuchs keeps being rediscovered. Thirteen years after his death his three Brooklyn novels of the 1930s have again been published in one big book, by the Black Sparrow press (David Godine) which has also issued a paperback reprint of Fuchs’s writings from and of his Hollywood years, The Golden West, excellently edited by Christopher Carduff.[1] Fuchs liked being rediscovered, not surprisingly, and finding “he had become a kind of cult.”
He didn’t think his Brooklyn novels were “first class,” which deprecation he immediately follows by saying “The books are fine … have a good tenement-house yeastiness and scent of life in them.”
That’s so. All three novels are Depression Brooklyn landscapes with figures, lots of figures. The yeastiness, the life, is in the quick, energetic representation of the first- and second-generation Jewish immigrant types that inhabit the tenements, “tenements resting like old dogs” in the quiet dawn. Out in the country, in the Jewish Catskills, the starry sky “resembled a huge ceiling in a Brooklyn burlesque house.” Fuchs has a gift for phrase, as you can see. He also has an ear for the way his types speak, the old and the young, the Jewish criminals and the other kinds, and especially the women with their terrible, mocking, tender, sentimental, hilarious tongues, not to forget their violent-mouthed children. Heshey’s mother, busy with breakfast, gives her protesting boy a push out into the corridor to join the children playing there. He makes a last try.
