Irving Louis Horowitz (1929–2012)

In this distinctive, unromanticized look at the immigrant experience and cultural assimilation, Rutgers sociology professor Horowitz, son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, writes of "growing up absurd in the streets of Black Harlem" during the 1930s. Though relations between blacks and Jews were tense, the author emulated blacks' "wild individualism"; he regularly visited the Apollo theater, where he saw Duke Ellington and Count Basie perform. The streets taught survival: numbers-running and ticket-scalping were a source of cash for Horowitz; turf wars and muggings were commonplace. The family, headed by a tyrannical father who beat the author and his sister, eventually moved out of Harlem, first to Brooklyn, then the Bronx.… (mere)