Reference no: EM132320930 , Length: word count : 500

ASSIGNMENT: Essay

Write a formal multi-paragraph essay of approximately 500 words.

CHOICE : Responding to Prose: "My Neighborhood" by Alfred Kazin

Discuss the narrator's contrasting feelings about the neighborhood of his youth. Be sure to make reference to the work in your response.

My Neighborhood by Alfred Kazin The block; my block. It was on the Chester Street side of our house, between the grocery and the back wall of the old drugstore, that I was hammered into the shape of the streets. Everything beginning at Blake Avenue would always wear for me some delightful strangeness and mildness simply because it was not of my block, the block, where the clang of your head sounded against the pavement when you fell in a fist fight, and the rows of store lights on each side were pitiless, watching you.

Anything away from the block was good: even a school you never went to, two blocks away; there were vegetable gardens in the park across the street. Returning from "New York," I would take the longest routes home from the subway, get off a station ahead of our own, only for the unexpectedness of walking through Betsy Head Park and hearing the gravel crunch under my feet as I went beyond the vegetable gardens, smelling the sweaty sweet dampness from the pool in summer and the dust on the leaves as I passed under the ailanthus trees. On the block itself everything rose up only to test me. We worked every inch of it, from the cellars and the backyards to the sickening space between the roofs.

Any wall, any stoop, any curving metal edge on a billboard sign made a place against which to knock a ball; any sewer cover a base; any crack in the pavement a "net" for the tense sharp tennis that we played by beating a soft ball back and forth with our hands between the squares. Betsy Head Park two blocks away would always feel slightly foreign, for it belonged to the Amboys and the Bristols and the Hopkinsons as much as it did to us.

Our life every day was fought out on the pavement and in the gutter, up against the walls of the houses and the glass fronts of the drugstore and the grocery, in and out of the fresh steaming piles of horse manure, the wheels of the passing carts and automobiles, along the iron spikes of the stairway to the cellar, the jagged edge of the open garbage cans, the crumbly steps of the old farmhouses still left on the side of the street. As I go back to the block now, and for a moment fold my body up again in its narrow arena - there, just there, between the back of the asphalt and the old women in their kerchiefs and flowered housedresses sitting on the tawny kitchen chairs - the back wall of the drugstore still rises up to test me.

Every day we smashed a small black viciously hard regulation handball against it with fanatical cuts and drives and slams, beating and slashing at it almost in hatred for the blind strength of the wall itself. I was never good enough at handball, was always practicing some trick shot that might earn me esteem, and when I was weary of trying, would often bat a ball down Chester Street just to get myself to Blake Avenue. I have this memory of playing one-o' cat by myself in the sleepy twilight, at a moment when everyone else had left the block.

The sparrows floated down from the telephone wires to peck at every fresh pile of horse manure, and there was the smell of brine from the delicatessen store, of egg crates and of the milk scum left in the great metal cans outside the grocery, of the thick white paste oozing out from behind the fresh Hecker's Flour ad on the metal signboard. I would throw the ball in the air, hit it with my bat, then with perfect satisfaction drop the bat to the ground and run to the next sewer cover. Over and over I did this, from sewer cover to sewer cover, until I had worked my way to Blake Avenue and could see the park.