Brooklyn

Brooklyn is a place where people try to make a life between jobs, family obligations, and political commitments, but rarely a place of lasting security. For Joe Williams, it offers a boarding house, treatment, and the kindness of Mrs. Olsen before he returns to sea; for Ben Compton, it is home, the place he hopes to revisit before going to jail, and a point of connection to the wider workers’ movement. These different paths make Brooklyn at once a refuge, a working landscape, and a threshold from which its residents leave.

Waterfront work and a precarious landing

Joe reaches Brooklyn after a falling-out with old man Gaskin, whose barge had carried granite blocks. Once the cargo is unloaded in East New York, Gaskin refuses to keep him on, and Joe asks for his pay and leaves with forty-five dollars. He walks through Red Hook looking for a boarding house: the money in his pocket is a short-lived buffer, not a secure livelihood.

For the next few days, Joe reads want ads and searches for work around Brooklyn. His plans are interrupted when he becomes ill and visits a doctor recommended by another resident of the boarding house. The doctor diagnoses gonorrhea, requires daily afternoon treatment, and urges Joe to consider a separate blood test. Joe pays part of the treatment cost but defers the test. The diagnosis adds medical expense and uncertainty to his search for a job, leaving him to reckon with treatment, board, and how to write to Del while he is out of work.

The bridge, the boarding house, and Mrs. Olsen

After his first treatment, Joe avoids returning immediately to the boarding house and wanders the streets. He rests on a bench on a bridge he takes to be Brooklyn Bridge, looking through its cables toward the harbor and the tall buildings. The view does not resolve his practical worries: he has no job, must pay for his room, and expects more treatment. A newspaper headline about troops being sent to the Mexican border prompts him to consider joining the National Guard, but his illness would disqualify him; the prospect of returning to naval service offers little appeal. He reads the want ads before taking a car to Atlantic Avenue and going up four flights to the cot where he sleeps.

A storm leaves rain coming through the window above Joe’s bed. In the morning, the landlady, Mrs. Olsen, complains about the wet bed; when Joe responds, he realizes she is teasing him, and they laugh together. The exchange introduces a household that becomes more than lodging. Mrs. Olsen has raised six children: three sons who went to sea, a schoolteacher daughter in St. Paul, and twin girls still at home. Her husband has been away in the South Seas for years, and she speaks of his recurrent trouble with the law in Brooklyn. Her family’s history is closely tied to maritime work, but her own household life is practical and self-reliant.

Joe helps Mrs. Olsen clean and takes odd painting and carpentry jobs. When his money runs out, she lets him stay and lends him twenty-five dollars toward the doctor’s fee. Her generosity gives him somewhere to recover and work while his prospects are limited. During the cold, sleety months, his days divide between studying navigation in her kitchen, waiting for treatment in a doctor’s office, and seeking maritime information at the Seamen’s Institute and the Seamen’s Union. He also encounters the anonymity of illness: men he has spoken with while waiting sometimes pass him in the street without acknowledging him. Against that isolation, Mrs. Olsen’s steady assistance becomes a source of attachment; Joe grows fonder of her than he had been of his own mother.

Leaving Brooklyn for the sea

The refuge has limits. When the doctor demands another twenty-five dollars to complete treatment, Joe refuses and signs on as an able seaman aboard the new Standard Oil tanker Montana. Its destination is Tampico, with the further voyage uncertain: some sailors expect Aden, others Bombay. Joe is tired of the cold, the sleet, the navigation exercises he cannot master, and what he experiences as Mrs. Olsen’s increasing involvement in his decisions. His departure does not cancel his gratitude; he regards her as good to him, but decides it is time to go.

The change from Brooklyn’s boarding-house routine to a ship bound for warmer waters is immediate. The Montana rounds Sandy Hook in a snowstorm, then reaches the Gulf Stream south of Hatteras three days later. Joe welcomes being back on blue water. In this part of the novel, Brooklyn is a temporary shore leave from the sea rather than a settled home for him: it receives him when work and health fail, but he leaves as soon as another berth becomes possible.

Home, political work, and the interrupted return

Later, Brooklyn is also the home of Ben Compton and his parents. Ben lives with them over the winter because it costs less while he studies law in Morris Stein’s office. His parents approve of the profession for practical reasons, believing a clever lawyer can defend workers and poor Jews while earning a living. Their faith in constitutional rights differs sharply from Ben’s experience and politics, and their conversation about it makes him uncomfortable. The family home therefore provides material support without resolving the ideological distance between generations.

Ben’s political life extends well beyond the neighborhood. He works as a clerk on lower Broadway and speaks at protest meetings about the Everett Massacre. Fanya Stein, Morris’s sister and an ardent pacifist, lends him books by Tolstoy and Kropotkin and sometimes drives him between meetings. His audiences include garment workers on the East Side, waterfront workers in Brooklyn, factory workers in Newark, and gatherings at Madison Square Garden. The meetings turn his initial fear of public speaking into a moment of collective force: as he speaks, the crowd’s attention steadies him, and the language of protest and united working-class action becomes part of his public role. Afterward, Fanya praises him and sometimes takes him for supper before he goes home to Brooklyn. He knows she loves him, though their conversations rarely leave the movement.

The Russian February Revolution intensifies the political hopes shared by Ben and the Steins. Ben and the family follow newspaper reports closely, while his father imagines revolutions spreading through other countries; Ben extends that expectation to the United States. When Woodrow Wilson declares war, however, Fanya returns from a peace delegation to Washington, D.C., and breaks down in distress after the delegation’s attempt to reach the President ends with demonstrators being driven from the White House lawn and several women arrested. Ben visits her, but leaves to attend to movement work. Their separation marks a strain between personal attachment and political purpose that Brooklyn does not contain or settle.

Later, with Ben facing jail, he considers going to Brooklyn to say goodbye to his parents. On the way, he stops at the subway station and finds himself unable to continue; he decides he will write instead. The next morning he carries a suitcase to Morris Stein’s office, preparing for the journey into custody without having made the visit home. Brooklyn thus remains emotionally present at the moment of departure, but the return is only contemplated, then abandoned.

A city of temporary shelter and departure

The novel gives Brooklyn no single role. Its streets and boarding houses expose how quickly a sailor’s wages can be consumed by illness, rent, and the search for another berth, while Mrs. Olsen’s kitchen demonstrates how a household can provide practical care beyond formal employment. In Ben’s story, the borough’s meaning is less a specific urban scene than the pull of family and the working-class constituencies his politics addresses. Joe leaves Brooklyn for the sea; Ben cannot bring himself to visit before going to jail. In both trajectories, the borough is a stopping place whose shelter matters precisely because it does not prevent departure.