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ESS, ESS, MEIN KINDT by Harry Golden

ESS, ESS, MEIN KINDT

By

Pub Date: Oct. 24th, 1966
Publisher: Putnam

Eat, Eat, My Child is one of Golden's best books, a collection of squibs about American culture from childhood days in the Lower East Side ghetto of 1910 to his support of Bobby Kennedy's senatorial campaign. There are about 170 pieces, some only two or three sentences long. The RFK story, which appeared in Esquire, is the most polished piece, insightful and sympathetic. He comments about Hedy Lamarr's arrest, James Bond's car in Goldfinger, topless waitresses, the Mets, the Negroes, Kerensky and the Revolution, Tarzan and Lolita, the American breast fetish, San Francisco, Father Divine, flying saucers and Warren Harding's philandering. As information, it goes in one eye and out the other. But as an attitude, it is often rich and full of the right ideas (from a Northern viewpoint). Among Golden's foibles which have the ring of tempered thought are his unsmiling suggestions that the Negroes are finally liberating the White Southerners to a full, economic life, and that the Jews of the world should hold an ecumenical council and forgive the Christians for 2,000 years of rapacious anti-Semitism. (Rome recently forgave the Jews for the Crucifixion.) Golden's ""melodies of the ghetto"" are moving. A very fetching spirit throughout.