on-writing-well

Writing About Yourself: The Memoir 139
For Alfred Kazin, smell is a thread that he follows back to his
boyhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. From my first
encounter with Kazan's A Walker in the City, long ago, I remember
it as a sensory memoir. The following passage is not only a
good example of how to write with your nose; it shows how
memoir is nourished by a writers ability to create a sense of
place—what it was that made his neighborhood and his heritage
distinctive:
It was the darkness and emptiness of the streets I liked
most about Friday evening, as if in preparation for that day of
rest and worship which the Jews greet "as a bride"—that day
when the very touch of money is prohibited, all work, all
travel, all household duties, even to the turning on and off of
a light—Jewry had found its way past its tormented heart to
some ancient still center of itself. I waited for the streets to go
dark on Friday evening as other children waited for the
Christmas lights. . . . When I returned home after three, the
warm odor of a coffee cake baking in the oven, and the sight
of my mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum
on the dining room floor, filled me with such tenderness that
I could feel my senses reaching out to embrace every single
object in our household.. . .
My great moment came at six, when my father returned
from work, his overalls smelling faintly of turpentine and
shellac, white drops of silver paint still gleaming on his chin.
Hanging his overcoat in the long dark hall that led into our
kitchen, he would leave in one pocket a loosely folded copy
of the New York World; and then everything that beckoned
to me from that other hemisphere of my brain beyond the
East River would start up from the smell of fresh newsprint
and the sight of the globe on the front page. It was a paper
that carried special associations for me with Brooklyn Bridge.
They published the World under the green dome on Park