Between Two Rivers

For Mom and Dad, and for the city we love best.

How do you—how does anyone—come to know New York, let alone write about it?

I’d never asked myself this question until now, if only because I never felt I had to. Even as a native of “the city”—which, for the uninitiated, always refers to New York when uttered from anywhere within a roughly seventy-five-mile radius from the Empire State Building—I wouldn’t even know where to start. In fact, as someone who’s long spent most of his life in New Jersey, the state next door, I’ve inevitably lost much of the local ‘expertise’ that New Yorkers unabashedly pride themselves on.

For these reasons and others, I’d much prefer to leave the task of explaining the city to others who, “native” or not, have done it far more adroitly than I ever could. (One of the most compelling of these has only recently left our lives, and all too soon.) What I do want to understand more clearly, meanwhile, is the indispensable role that the city plays in my life story: not just in my earliest years or newfound present, but also in the ways I learned to navigate life in Ghent (a city which, for the record, I’d never confuse with New York despite its magical charms; even Brussels, for all its international character, sprawling beauty, and similar precarity, inevitably falls short). And that role, I’ve also come to see, could never be understood without looking back to the experiences of my parents when they first arrived in America via the city, decades before I left it.

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