A Kent Writer Recalls Her Manhattan Childhood

KENT — Betty Krasne’s "A Dangerous Thing: A Memoir of Learning and Teaching," is an event-packed trek through the evolution of a contemporary woman, born in the 1940s to Jewish parents in New York City. It was a mixed marriage: one side (the Krasnes) came from the Ukraine and promptly set up grocery stores, which eventually morphed into a wholesale food business. The other side (the Goldsteins) came from a brownstone in Philadelphia.

Throughout her life, Krasne has been tugged in two directions: home, which represented order and the comfortable life of material goods; and school, the world of ideas and creativity.

Despite being sent to good schools and having a mother who constantly had a book in her hand, "My family upbringing prepared me with only one capability: to spend money in good taste."

That home vs. school tug, of course, reflects the tug of business vs. intellect, working vs. motherhood, WASP vs. Jew, which Krasne felt throughout her life.

In many ways, some of this is all about America, where whatever we say about the importance of education, Krasne writes, "We don’t want to buy the books, pay the teachers, push the challenging work...experience is what counts."

As her father was fond of boasting, he never went to college and did just fine—fine enough to be able to promise his father-in-law that his future wife (against her wishes) would "never work a day in her life." His favorite maxim, Krasne tells us, was "Those who go to college work for those who never went." Against all this, Krasne set out to be pre-med.

Krasne, professor of literature at Mercy College and an author of novels for young readers under the name Betty K. Levine, grew up in New York City in a time when she and her sister could sled by themselves in Central Park or take the subway to the opera, when Jews lived on the West Side and Protestants on the East Side. The west 50s, Hell’s Kitchen, was Italian and Irish.

"To my sister and myself, New York meant Manhattan and Manhattan meant a few avenues running north-south for several dozen blocks," she writes. "The people we knew lived on Riverside Drive, West End Avenue and Central Park West. They were Jewish."

South of Central Park were the "3 Bs": Bonwits, Bergdorf’s and B. Altman.

From this amazingly parochial world, Krasne was sent daily to the Ethical Culture School, then Fieldstone and eventually Mt. Holyoke, where once again the tug of creativity vs. domesticity played large, and continued to do so through an early marriage (they were ages 24 and 26), three pregnancies, teaching positions, graduate school, the women’s movement and more.

Throughout the telling, Krasne draws portraits of family members on both sides and the dynamics that shaped their shared history. All of this, of course, in the effort to learn just what it is, and was,that made her the woman—the writer, teacher, mother, wife—she is today.

It is a lively and interesting story, a reflection of every middle-class girl coming of age in mid-century America, and of only one—as each story is representative and particular.

"All adults are immigrants from the country of childhood," writes Krasne, who tells her own story with the sharp eye and and wry observation that make peeking into someone else’s life so fascinating.