By the Waters of Manhattan

A novel about a Jewish immigrant family at the turn of the century - from Czarist Russia to Brownsville, Brooklyn. This is poet Charles Reznikoff's finest fiction.

By the Waters of Manhattan was Charles Reznikoff's first novel, published in 1930 by Charles Boni in New York. Part family saga, part bildungsroman, and part unrequited love story, the novel follows the lives of a Jewish family at the turn of the century from Elizavetgrad, Russia, to Brownsville, Brooklyn, birthplace of the novel's protagonist, Ezekiel, a young poet in search of ways to feed his stomach and his soul.

Like Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Henry Roth, Reznikoff's subject is as much the great island of Manhattan, as it is its inhabitants, struggling for their place in a new world.