DAYS AT THE MORN

by Samuel Chotzinoff ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

For the fifth time, Samuel Chotzinoff has tapped his memory-energy cable and produced a book that is full of life. Most men who have moved from the Lower East side to the world of the beaux arts or bellos letters, when they write their reminiscences tend to sound somewhat stereotyped. Even the best of them, such as Harry Golden or Sam Levenson, rely on humor, and of a kind that is almost-but-not-quite universal in its rusticity. Chotzinoff, though his background was in no specific way atypical, has distilled his Jewishness to a pure, even an exotic, form, and successfully blends it, in his books as he has in his life, into the complex socio-chemical structure of a multisectarian experience. To those who have read A Lost Paradiso, A Little Nightmusic, and his other books, it is no secret that he writes very well -- of love, ambition, embarrassment, and even tragedy. Days at the Morn describes his travails as a piano teacher, his reactions to college, and his first tentative steps ""out"" into the broad world peopled by the painters, writers, musicians, and society people among whom he has spent his adult life. It is a period piece, since the names -- Mahler, Belasco, the Manhattan Opera House, Alma Gluck, Zimbalist and his wealthy patrons the Felses of soap fame, and of course Toscanini -- and the fashions denote a particular historical time. Yet the effervescence of Chotzinoff's undimmed remembrance of things past forges a tangible link between all the art that has been and all the art there will ever be.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964

Categories: NONFICTION