Lower East Side Memories
: A Jewish Place in America 

By HASIA R. DINER
The Lower East Side and American Jewish Memory

I'm Jewish because love my family matzoh ball soup.
I'm Jewish because my fathers mothers uncles grandmothers said "Jewish," all the way back to Vitebsk & Kaminetz-Podolska via Lvov.
Jewish because reading Dostoyevsky at 13 I write poems at restaurant tables Lower East Side, perfect delicatessen intellectual. —Allen Ginsberg, "Yiddishe Kopf" The poet Allen Ginsberg, born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, returned in his later years to a narrative style of expression, shifting gears from the anger and fire of his early career. In this poem from 1991 he also touched down again, after a long hiatus spent exploring Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, upon some Jewish themes, as a way of remembering the world of his youth. He described that world in one poem, "Yiddishe Kopf," literally, a Jewish head, but more broadly, a highly distinctive Jewish way of thinking, based on insight, cleverness, and finesse. That world for him stood upon two zones of remembrance. The world of eastern Europe, of Vitebsk, Lvov, and Kamenets-Podolski gave him one anchor for his Jewishness. Thai space of memory gave him a focus for continuity and inherited identity, tied down by the weight of the past, by family in particular. The other, the Lower East Side, nurtured and fed him. It also offered him his passport out of and into the bigger world. Here he wrote his youthful poetry, he told his readers, at delicatessen tables, influenced by the great ideas of Western civilization—in this poem, through reading Dostoyevsky. This formulation, while captivating in Ginsberg's distinctive rapid-fire, challenging style, was actually less original and much more