Author Crusades For The Urban Poor Kozol Adds To His List With New Book Detailing The Plight Of Bronx Children

“My friends tell me: ‘You look worn out, Jonathan. I’m worried about you,”’ said Jonathan Kozol, perched on a battered counter stool, its cover worn to the wood, at B&V pizza and doughnuts in the South Bronx.

“They take me to fancy restaurants in midtown Manhattan, but I lose my appetite. It just seems strange. I’d rather be here. My digestion is better. I mean this $2.35 tuna sandwich tastes good to me, and I don’t have to think which fork to use.”

For almost three decades, Kozol has been plumbing the depths of poor inner-city neighborhoods and the children who live there, first as an idealistic young teacher in the Roxbury section of Boston, then as a celebrated advocate for the poor and forgotten, now as what even he takes to be something of a relic of an earlier age of urban optimism.

His labors have won him widespread acclaim and awards, as well as some degree of skepticism from critics who contend that he walks a fine line between crusading reporting about the urban poor and pious moralizing that is short on solutions.

Like or dislike his books, it is hard not to see the descending arc of urban policy and the worsening plight of the inner-city poor in Kozol’s evolution, from the crusading optimism of his first book, “Death at an Early Age,” to the angry pessimism and tentative, weary spirituality of his most recent work, “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation” (Crown Books, 1995), a depiction of Mott Haven in the South Bronx.

“I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: ‘Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn’t know that. Let’s go out and fix it,”’ he said at the B&V.

“I thought then the problem was lack of knowledge,” he continued. “Now I think it’s lack of will. Now, I don’t expect what I write to change things. I think I write now simply as a witness. This is how it is. This is what we have done. This is what we have permitted.”

Kozol’s odyssey began in 1964, when he returned to Boston after graduating from Harvard University, studying at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and spending four years as an aspiring writer in Paris.

Amid the excitement of the civil-rights era, he began teaching black children in Roxbury, first in a summer freedom school, then as a fourth-grade substitute teacher.

He was dismissed for teaching unauthorized texts, specifically the poetry of Langston Hughes.

His journal from the 1964-65 school year was turned into “Death at an Early Age,” which won a National Book Award and is often ranked with books like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” and Michael Harrington’s “Other America” as an influential work that both reflected and shaped the conscience of its time.

Since then he has written about “Illiterate America” (1985), about homelessness in “Rachel and Her Children” (1988) and about the disastrous state of urban education in “Savage Inequalities” (1991).

Publisher’s Weekly, for the first time in its history, endorsed “Savage Inequalities” on its cover, imploring President George Bush to read it. The book went on to become a best seller.

On the other hand, some critics have found some of his books hectoring and self-righteous, as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt did in The New York Times. In his review of “Illiterate America,” he wrote: “Eventually, one begins to wonder who precisely Mr. Kozol means to be whipping with the sodden lettuce leaves of his incessant piety.”

Kozol, 59 and divorced (he has no children), speaks in soft, precise, professorial inflections. Although he admitted that his brand of consuming liberal angst was utterly out of fashion, he said that this says more about the times than about him.

“I talk to people, and they grow impatient,” he said. “They say: ‘Well, of course, we know all that. Tell us something new.”’ There’s this kind of urbane equanimity about it, spiced with irony, like a cultivated kind of weariness.

“It’s like you can’t speak of this without incurring the charges of self-righteousness. But to me the central fact of life in New York City is the terrible sin hidden in the center of the city’s romance.”

To him, that sin is the racial segregation and crushing poverty in places like the South Bronx, where he spent the better part of the past two years while researching and writing “Amazing Grace.” He writes of mothers with AIDS shuttled between unfeeling bureaucracies, of the children who make their way through an urban wilderness of crime, drugs and abandonment and of the children who die young there.

A postscript lists 23 children who died while he was working on the book.

He was asked if some of his concerns, such as his discomfort at being at parties where the food is served and the cleaning up is done by black maids, just as it was when he was a boy a half-century ago, might come across merely as liberal guilt. This discomfort can also apply to other aspects of his life.

In Byfield, Mass., a picturesque New England town where he lives in a 200-year-old farmhouse, “the golden retrievers have a nicer place to play than the children do in the South Bronx,” he said.

“I’d say there’s a lot to be guilty about,” he continued. “A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.

“I mean, what I’ve seen in this neighborhood and in similar neighborhoods for 30 years isn’t a misfortune that happened by mistake.

“This is an injustice. This is an artfully created lazaretto, and I think those powerful people who created it have a lot to be guilty about and ought to be condemned. And the people in this book frequently do condemn them.”