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communal toilet – Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet. What is sacred for him is mother love. Eventually, we can guess, the radiance of this primal event in his life is what he will seek by bending the recalcitrant world into words. “Outside,” in the cellar especially, is the world of fear he must learn to master. The whole first section of the book is named “The Cellar” because it deals with the underground side of life – physical, aggressive, sexual. A crippled neighborhood girl wants him to play “bad” with her. She explains that babies come from “de knish.”
    â€” Knish?
    â€œBetween de legs. Who puts id in is de poppa. De poppa’s god de petzel. Yaw de poppa.” She giggled stealthily and took his hand. He could feel her guiding it under her dress, then through a pocket-like flap. Her skin under his palm. Revolted, he drew back.
    â€œYuh must!” she insisted, tugging his hand. “Yuh ast me!”
    â€œNo!”
    â€œPut yuh han’ in my knish,” she coaxed. “Jus’ once.”
    â€œNo!”
    â€œI’ll hol’ yuh petzel.” She reached down.
    She tells David that they have been playing “bad.” “By the emphasis of her words, David knew he had crossed some awful threshold. ‘Will yuh tell?’ ‘No,’ he answered weakly.” When his mother gets him home, “she didn’t know as he knew how the whole world could break into a thousand little pieces, all buzzing, all whining, and no one hearing them and no one seeing them except himself.”
    David is now a fallen creature, out of Eden, who must confront the terrible but fascinating city by himself. What had occurred to him in earliest childhood is now dead certainty: “This world had been created without thought of him.” By the same token, he is free. The joy of being a boy in the city, that endless spectacle, is that the findings are everywhere. In a box kept in the pantry he collects “whatever striking odds and ends he found in the street. His mother called them his gems and often asked him why he liked things that were worn and old. It would have been hard to tell her. But there was something about the way in which the link of a chain was worn or the thread on a bolt or a castor-wheel that gave him a vague feeling of pain when he ran his fingers over them.… You never saw them wear, you only knew they were worn, obscurely aching.”
    This concern with materials marks the novelist-to-be. From this point on, the city becomes the web of life in which, even when he is “lostest,” David senses his destiny. It is the writer’s city of instant and continuing perception, the Joyce-inspired city of wonders as they come to us through the sensations of a very young being:
    When he had come almost to the end of the dock, he sat down, and with his feet hanging over the water leaned against the horned and bulbous stanchion to which boats were moored. Out here the wind was fresher. The uncommon quiet excited him. Beneath and under his palms, the dry, splintering timbers radiated warmth. And beneath them, secret, unseen, and always faintly sinister, the tireless lipping of water among the piles. Before him, the river and to the right, the long, grey bridges spanning it –
    A bridge makes David think of the sword with the “big middle” that used to appear on the Mecca cigarette composed of Turkish tobacco, of the bridge clipping the plumes of a long ship steaming beneath it, of gulls whose faces are as ugly as their flight is graceful, as they wheel through the wide air on wings that cut like a sickle. A tug on the other side of the river pecks at a barge, stolid in the water. “Yoked at length to its sluggish mate,” it gives the barge the look of a mustache! The water is sunlit rhythmic spray sprouting up before the blunt bow of the barge. The spray hangs “whitely” before it