New York City is presented as Robert Cohn’s point of familial origin and inherited privilege, but also as the place whose social world makes his later mobility intelligible. Through his father, Cohn belongs to one of the richest Jewish families in New York City; through his mother, he belongs to one of its oldest. The city therefore anchors him in both economic capital and established family standing, even as his subsequent life carries him away from it and into American and European literary circles.

Family Origin and Social Position

New York City defines Cohn’s background before the narrative follows him into schools, marriages, and expatriate life. His father’s family gives him substantial wealth, while his mother’s family supplies a different kind of inherited status through age and established position. These resources place Cohn within a privileged urban family structure, yet they do not prevent him from experiencing social exclusion elsewhere. His later vulnerability is therefore not caused by a lack of money or education; it emerges from the conflict between inherited standing and the racialized treatment he encounters at Princeton University.

Wealth and Its Consequences

Cohn’s connection to New York City is also material. His father leaves him fifty thousand dollars, although most of the inheritance is lost and the balance passes to his mother. That reduced fortune still finances important stages of his later life. After his divorce, Cohn goes to California and uses what remains to back a literary magazine, first published in Carmel-by-the-Sea and later completed in Provincetown. His mother subsequently settles an allowance of about three hundred dollars a month on him, giving him continued financial support during his years in Europe.

The movement of this money away from New York City turns family inheritance into cultural and geographic mobility. Cohn is able to become a magazine backer, then its sole editor, not because he has secured recognition through literary achievement, but because inherited resources allow him to occupy an editorial position. He discovers that he likes the authority of editing and regrets having to give up the magazine when it becomes too expensive. New York City thus remains present as an invisible financial source even after Cohn has physically left it.

From New York City to an International Life

Cohn’s biography moves outward from New York City through a sequence of departures. After a difficult marriage and divorce, he goes to the Coast, enters literary circles, and becomes involved in publishing. The magazine’s route from Carmel-by-the-Sea to Provincetown mirrors Cohn’s own unsettled movement across American cultural spaces. When Frances urges him to go to Europe so that he can write, he crosses the Atlantic and spends three years abroad, the first traveling and the last two in Paris.

His life in Europe is sustained by the combination of family money, literary ambition, and personal attachment. During those years he writes a novel, reads extensively, plays bridge and tennis, and boxes at a local gymnasium. He is described as having preferred America while living in Europe, so the movement away from New York City does not signify a clean rejection of the United States. Instead, his expatriate existence is marked by a persistent tension between departure and imagined return.

Narrative Significance

New York City matters less as a scene of action than as the compressed background behind Cohn’s later choices. It explains the scale of his family resources, the economic possibility of his literary venture, and the contradictory social position of a wealthy Jewish man who nevertheless carries painful self-consciousness from being treated as different at Princeton University. The city’s significance lies in this contrast: it gives Cohn inheritance without resolving his need for recognition.

That unresolved need reappears in the forms of life he chooses after leaving New York City. Boxing offers him a physical means of countering humiliation; editing gives him authority; writing offers a cultural identity; and Europe offers distance without fully becoming home. The city therefore functions as the originating point of a life organized by movement, compensation, and the search for a belonging that wealth alone cannot provide.