Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 2K views

    Descriptive Essay - The Kitchen - Alfred Kazin

    Uploaded by

    Hamza Asim
    The author's family lived in a Brownsville tenement where the kitchen was the largest room and center of family life. His mother worked as a dressmaker in the kitchen, making dresses for local women. The kitchen held their lives together - the family ate, did homework, and spent time there, especially in the winter. It was the focal point of the home filled with activity, memories, and superstitions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Descriptive Essay - The Kitchen - Alfred Kazin

    Uploaded by

    Hamza Asim
    2K views3 pages
    The author's family lived in a Brownsville tenement where the kitchen was the largest room and center of family life. His mother worked as a dressmaker in the kitchen, making dresses for local women. The kitchen held their lives together - the family ate, did homework, and spent time there, especially in the winter. It was the focal point of the home filled with activity, memories, and superstitions.

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    The author's family lived in a Brownsville tenement where the kitchen was the largest room and center of family life. His mother worked as a dressmaker in the kitchen, making dresses for local women. The kitchen held their lives together - the family ate, did homework, and spent time there, especially in the winter. It was the focal point of the home filled with activity, memories, and superstitions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    2K views3 pages

    Descriptive Essay - The Kitchen - Alfred Kazin

    Uploaded by

    Hamza Asim
    The author's family lived in a Brownsville tenement where the kitchen was the largest room and center of family life. His mother worked as a dressmaker in the kitchen, making dresses for local women. The kitchen held their lives together - the family ate, did homework, and spent time there, especially in the winter. It was the focal point of the home filled with activity, memories, and superstitions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    You are on page 1of 3
    At a glance
    Powered by AI
    The passage describes how the kitchen was the center of family life and activities for the narrator growing up in a Brooklyn tenement. The mother worked as a dressmaker in the kitchen.

    The mother's occupation was a 'home' dressmaker. She would design and sew dresses for local women in the family's kitchen.

    Most family activities like eating, the narrator doing homework, and sleeping near the stove in winter took place in the kitchen.

    “The Kitchen” – Alfred Kazin

    In Brownsville tenements the kitchen is always the largest room and the center of

    the household. As a child I felt that we lived in a kitchen to which four other rooms

    were annexed. My mother, a "home" dressmaker, had her workshop in the kitchen.

    She told me once that she had begun dressmaking in Poland at thirteen; as far back

    as I can remember, she was always making dresses for the local women. She had

    an innate sense of design, a quick eye for all the subtleties in the latest fashions,

    even when she despised them, and great boldness. For three or four dollars she

    would study the fashion magazines with a customer, go with the customer to the

    remnants store on Belmont Avenue to pick out the material, argue the owner

    down--all remnants stores, for some reason, were supposed to be shady, as if the

    owners dealt in stolen goods--and then for days would patiently fit and paste and

    sew and fit again. Our apartment was always full of women in their housedresses

    sitting around the kitchen table waiting for a fitting. My little bedroom next to the

    kitchen was the fitting room. The sewing machine, an old nut-brown Singer with

    golden scrolls painted along the black arm and engraved along the two tiers of little

    drawers massed with needles and thread on each side of the treadle, stood next to

    the window and the great coal-black stove which up to my last year in college was

    our main source of heat. By December the two outer bed-rooms were closed off,

    and used to chill bottles of milk and cream, cold borscht, and jellied calves' feet.
    The kitchen held our lives together. My mother worked in it all day long, we

    ate in it almost all meals except the Passover seder, I did my homework and first

    writing at the kitchen table, and in winter I often had a bed made up for me on

    three kitchen chairs near the stove. On the wall just over the table hung a long

    horizontal mirror that sloped to a ship's prow at each end and was lined in cherry

    wood. It took up the whole wall, and drew every object in the kitchen to itself. The

    walls were a fiercely stippled whitewash, so often rewhitened by my father in slack

    seasons that the paint looked as if it had been squeezed and cracked into the walls.

    A large electric bulb hung down the center of the kitchen at the end of a chain that

    had been hooked into the ceiling; the old gas ring and key still jutted out of the

    wall like antlers. In the corner next to the toilet was the sink at which we washed,

    and the square tub in which my mother did our clothes. Above it, tacked to the

    shelf on which were pleasantly ranged square, blue-bordered white sugar and spice

    jars, hung calendars from the Public National Bank on Pitkin Avenue and the

    Minsker Progressive Branch of the Workmen's Circle; receipts for the payment of

    insurance premiums, and household bills on a spindle; two little boxes engraved

    with Hebrew letters. One of these was for the poor, the other to buy back the Land

    of Israel. Each spring a bearded little man would suddenly appear in our kitchen,

    salute us with a hurried Hebrew blessing, empty the boxes (sometimes with a

    sidelong look of disdain if they were not full), hurriedly bless us again for
    remembering our less fortunate Jewish brothers and sisters, and so take his

    departure until the next spring, after vainly trying to persuade my mother to take

    still another box. We did occasionally remember to drop coins in the boxes, but

    this was usually only on the dreaded morning of "midterms" and final

    examinations, because my mother thought it would bring me luck. She was

    extremely superstitious, but embarrassed about it, and always laughed at herself

    whenever, on the morning of an examination, she counseled me to leave the house

    on my right foot. "I know it's silly," her smile seemed to say, "but what harm can it

    do? It may calm God down."

    You might also like