Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue Read Online Free PDF Page B

from college that Kant had said this in his infelicitously titled I dee zu einer allgemeinen Geschkhte in der weltbürgerlichen Absicht "What appears to be complicated and accidental in individuals, may yet be understood as a steady, progressive, though slow, evolution of the original endowments of the entire species." Aside from the fact that Nathan's parents hated the way their son could quote Kant and had squandered his education on mastering words such as weltbürgerlichen, it was possible that a life was completely shaped by parents who in turn were shaped by grandparents so that a life in the East Village was shaped two hundred years ago by some forgotten incident on the Polish banks of the Vistula River.
    Harry, another musician who could not play an instrument, could not see this. He managed the real estate holdings Ruth had inherited from her father. Her father, like Harry, had been a visionary down on his luck. Ruth's father had realized that the children of the Jews in the shops in the Lower East Side were one day going to have money, and when they did, they would move north because in Manhattan history, people had always headed north for better spaces. So he invested everything he had on Avenues A and B, the area just north of the slum. He bought buildings and lots. The building in which the family now lived, large by neighborhood standards, was built by Ruth's father, who had hired a noted 1920s architect. But the father had underestimated his neighbors; they did move north, but much farther than he had imagined—to the Bronx. Once the market crashed in 1929, he was ruined. Most of the Jews in the neighborhood had heard that after the market crash, he had leapt from his fine new building's art deco roof onto the pavement of Avenue A. The story was not true; he had died of illness in 1932, leaving his family with a great deal of unwanted real estate.
    Ruth married Harry, an immigrant who always insisted that he had been a music impresario in Warsaw Even when he spoke very little English, he used the word "impresario" with great dexterity, though no one was sure what he meant by it. In New York he tried to produce concerts with stars from the Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue, but no one came. He moved on to jazz and even befriended Charlie Parker, who lived on the other side of Tompkins Square. He never questioned, though many did, how Harry Seltzer was able to mount a Charlie Parker concert. "He's a friend," Harry would explain irritably. Harry helped other people and assumed that other people wanted to help him. But his friend died of a drug overdose only weeks before the concert date, and Harry had to pay back the ticket holders, incurring a debt that took him years to settle. Seeking release from these obligations, he formed the real estate holdings into a corporation for the purpose of declaring bankruptcy. But Ruth would not let him declare bankruptcy, which she insisted was dishonorable.
    Harry tried to produce concerts with Chow Mein Vega, but so few people came that it didn't pay for the rental of the hall on Second Avenue and Harry slid further into debt. But Chow Mein had been a big star in the sixties when boogaloo was popular, and Harry never lost faith that boogaloo would one day be big again and when that happened he would be well positioned as an impresario.
    In the meantime, Harry managed his wife's real estate inheritance. Many of the lots and buildings were left unoccupied. Nonpaying tenants, squatters, had moved in. In most cases the squatters improved the properties, and since Harry did not have any other customers, he was happy to have them stay. He could not have forced them out in any event because he thought of them as his friends. The only really paying building was the one he lived in. Except for his apartment and Nathan's, they were all rented. Of course, Mrs. Kleinman did not always pay because of her postal problems. Birdie Nagel in 2H, whose name wasn't really Birdie but was always