The latest installment of The Trainjotting Reader comes from Philip Roth, who’s written numerous books describing Newark in the old days–middle class, white, Jewish. You probably know him from that dirty scene in Portnoy’s Complaint.
This comes from his first book, a 1959 novella called Goodbye, Columbus that came out when he was just 26. It’s about a working-class kid from Newark and his budding summer relationship with a posh girl from the ‘burbs.
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The next morning I found a parking space on Washington Street directly across from the library. Since I was twenty minutes early I decided to stroll in the park rather than cross over to work; I didn’t particularly care to join my colleagues, who I knew would be sipping early morning coffee in the binding room, smelling still of all the orange crush they’d drunk that weekend at Asbury Park. I sat on a bench and looked out towards Broad Street and the morning traffic. The Lackawanna commuter trains were rumbling in a few blocks to the north and I could hear them, I thought–the sunny green cars, old and clean, with windows that opened all the way. Some mornings, with time to kill before work, I would walk down to the tracks and watch the open windows roll in, on their sills the elbows of tropical suits and the edges of briefcases, the properties of businessmen arriving in town from Maplewood, the Oranges, and the suburbs beyond.