ne of the longest journeys in the world,” Norman Podhoretz wrote famously in his 1967 memoir Making It, “is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan—or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.” In this era when many Brooklyn neighborhoods are as chic as any part of Manhattan, it should be explained that Podhoretz was referring to the transformation that he and others of his generation had undergone from lower-class slum kid to upper-middle-class sophisticate.
One boy who made that journey was Woody Allen, who begins his own new memoir, Apropos of Nothing, with a brisk, vivid, and extremely funny account of his boyhood as a “misanthropic gangster-loving illiterate” with parents “as mismatched as Hannah Arendt and Nathan Detroit” but who “loved each other in their own way, a way known perhaps only to a few headhunting tribes in Borneo.” Allen says his young self “never rose academically above baseball, pinochle, or Hopalong Cassidy movies.”
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