LIDIA VIANU

Poets' New York

LEAH FRITZ

Interviews with Leah Fritz
Published in LIDIA VIANU, Desperado Essay-Interviews, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2006

© Lidia Vianu
 

LIDIA VIANU: Were you born in New York? When? What was it like when you were a child?

LEAH FRITZ: Yes, I was born in New York. We moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan when I was small, and lived there until I was about five years old. I went to kindergarten there, and have many memories of it. One is that we lived near a synagogue, and since I was small and cute, my friends used to send me down into it when there was a wedding, because they would always give me cake to take to my friends. My sister was five years older, and I think I hung around with her and her friends a lot, although there was a little boy I played with across the street. Where we lived then was really quite suburban, but soon we moved back to Manhattan, which was ‘the city.’


LV. Is childhood in New York any different from childhood in a smaller town or in the country?

LF. Yes, I think it is somewhat different. In Manhattan, we were exposed to art at an early age. By 11, one of my ‘hang-outs’ was the Museum of Modern Art, and I also went to the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Natural History – all not far away. My own children were brought up in these places, too. I think New York is a brilliant place to bring up kids. It’s only when you get older, that you may want to leave.


LV. What did your house look like?

LF. I lived in several houses.The first I remember was the top floor apartment in a three-story red brick house in Brooklyn that my father built. He was an architect, and during the depression we were pretty broke, so he built a house for a cousin who was less broke, and we got the top floor apartment. That was very nice. My uncle George lived with us, and we had a young woman who lived there, too, and did the cleaning and took care of me. She was a Polish American from a mining town in Pennsylvania. I loved her a lot. She left when I was four years old to ‘better’ herself: she became a waitress. My mother kept up with her, and later Anna married and did very well. We had a large terrace at the back of our apartment there, which made it very pleasant. Eventually, my parents bought a house on the West Side of Manhattan. My father had an office there, and we used the ground floor and the first floor for our home. We had a back garden, so we lived differently from most people in Manhattan who usually live in apartments. We rented out the rest (it was five stories altogether) as small apartments, at low rentals – but they paid our mortgage.


LV. Was it typical of New York architecture? What is, in your opinion, typical of New York architecture? Do New Yorkers love their housing comfort?

LF. The house we lived in on the West Side of Manhattan was limestone and Victorian. My father altered it to suit us. It was typical of that kind of architecture. Manhattan is, as everyone knows, basically a bunch of canyons between skyscrapers, but there are many limestone and brownstone houses five stories high that still exist in between. Yes, of course, New Yorkers like comfort! Who doesn’t?


LV. Could you feel as a child that New York was a multicultural city? Did you fit in easily or did you feel an outsider?

LF. I didn’t think about multiculturalism as a child. White and black people lived in different parts of the city then, and in my neighbourhood – both in Brooklyn and later in Manhattan – most people were Jewish, although there were many who were not. There were many refugees from the holocaust in Manhattan when I was growing up. Although in general I ‘fit in’ with the other children, I felt in some ways an outsider because of personality differences. For one thing, I was considered something of an ‘intellectual,’ which was frowned on by some children. I was sociable, on the one hand, but did have my head in the clouds often. To a great extent I lived in my own world. I must say, though, that I was never a true introvert, nor was I, generally speaking, an unhappy child. Every summer I went to camp in the countryside, and there I did often feel unhappy because I was poor at sports.


LV. As a teenager in New York, what was your cultural life? TV? Theatres? Movies?

LF. Not TV. That came later. I did go to the theatre, but more often to the movies, which were much less expensive. I would say the museums and libraries were very important. At the Museum of Modern Art I saw foreign movies and old silent films which made a great impression.


LV. As a student and later, what magazines did you like to read?

LF. The New Yorker was my favourite.


LV. When did you become interested in New York’s literary life and what places did you go to, what New York reviews did you read?

LF. In my late teens I became involved with artists and writers socially. I worked at the Museum of Modern Art for a while. I spent a lot of time in Greenwich Village, had artist boyfriends... I wrote poetry from the time I was eight and always thought I’d be a writer. I read the reviews in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Village Voice (which I later wrote for, along with other publications, but I rarely did reviews).


LV. Was it uncomfortable at all to live in a place which was a melting pot of all nationalities? Did you ever feel uncomfortably different from anyone?

LF. No, except in ways described above.


LV. Could you describe the social classes in New York? Have they changed since your were a child? Which do you belong to?

LF. I find it difficult to answer this question. I guess I was ‘middle class.’ But I was never conscious of class then. Not even when I was grown up and worked in Harlem, where class differences should have been obvious. I was aware of poor and not poor and rich – but never in an ideological sense. The racial and sexual differentials seemed more urgent. In New York, poverty was more evident among African Americans and Hispanic Americans than among ‘whites,’ and seemed more a consequence of race/ethnicity than of class, so I was working to help correct that imbalance, and also the aggression against and misunderstanding of women.


LV. Why did you leave New York?

LF. For many complex reasons.


LV. Was it an easy decision?

LF. Surprisingly, yes.


LV. If you were to decide to come and live in London again, would you still do it?

LF. You bet I would!


LV. What was the impact of London on you? How old were you when you came to London?

LF. I was 54. It made me happy. I’ve made a whole life here. It’s probably the best place in the world to live. I’m very lucky.


LV. Who were your literary friends in New York and who are now your literary friends in London?

LF. My friends in New York were the important feminist writers. We’ve just lost one of them, Andrea Dworkin. There is Susan Brownmiller, Grace Paley, Robin Morgan, Shere Hite – many others. Sometimes I see them when I go there or they come here. My literary friends in London are a legion! A hundred poets, perhaps. The ones I am closest to are not at all well-known – neither am I! – but they do very fine work.


LV. Where do you feel more at home, London or New York?

LF. In London.


LV. Does your poetry have traces of New York imagery? What is the emblematic feature of New York in your soul?

LF. Of course, my New York background is evident in my work. I am a quintessential New Yorker – and proud of it. My accent is undeniable. The ‘emblematic feature’ is my sense that I can do or be anything I want to; in a word, freedom. And, I suppose, optimism. And, I suppose, street-smarts. That’s a certain caution in the streets, knowing how to relate to really bizarre situations and surviving them. But I say this with my fingers crossed and knocking on wood.


June 12, 2005