A huge circular fountain gushes in the spacious sun-lit lobby of a luxury hotel just off Michigan Avenue. There is a sense of serene well-being in the sound, a sense of opulence in the surroundings.
On the 19th floor, Jonathan Kozol is being interviewed about his new book, ”Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America” (Crown, $16.95).
The contrast between the elegant setting of the interview and the wrenching hardships of homelessness is obvious and jarring. But a central point in Kozol`s book is that such extremes of affluence and distress have become commonplace.
”Since 1980,” Kozol writes, ”homelessness has changed its character. What was once a theater of the grotesque (bag ladies in Grand Central Station, winos sleeping in the dusty sun outside the Greyhound station in El Paso) has grown into the common misery of millions.”
We cannot avoid seeing the homeless everywhere among us, but perhaps as a people, Kozol said, we have begun to take their presence for granted; we certainly have done little to help them.
”Rachel and Her Children” is sprinkled with statistics that document the extent of the problem, but Kozol lets the men and women who have lost their homes do most of the talking.
By doing so, he provides a human face to what has become for many of us a disagreeable abstraction; he compels us to look homelessness in the eye and to see a reflection of ourselves.
The evidence is that a majority of the homeless are families instead of individuals, Kozol said.
”Many working Americans are two or three paychecks or one catastrophe away from the street. In many cases, the homeless people I talked to, although they were poor their entire lives, had been working, had had full-time jobs and had then found themselves thrown into the shelter system by some terrible event. Maybe it was a serious illness or surgery, the death of a relative or a fire that destroyed a home.”
Most of the people Kozol interviewed and came to know were staying in the Hotel Martinique, a squalid temporary shelter in midtown Manhattan. Among the 400 families it houses in its 16 stories were more than 1,400 children.
”I`ve seen a lot of misery, but I`ve never seen anything like the Martinique,” Kozol said. ”It`s the saddest place I`ve ever been.
”To call it a shelter is too benign. It`s a refugee camp, an internment camp. People who visit for the first time say it reminds them of a prison, and it feels like one.
”The paint on its walls and ceilings is saturated with lead, which is deadly and which hungry children eat. It`s cold in winter, steaming in summer. Cockroaches are everywhere. People cover the broken windows with plastic garbage bags.
”At night you see five or six people crowded in one or two cramped rooms, which are hardly bigger than prison cells. There are no kitchens;
people cook illegally on hot plates, often in bathrooms, the same filthy bathrooms they share sometimes with another family, who may have unknown diseases.
”There are no tables in the rooms. Children eat with their parents on the bed or floor. I`ve eaten many meals, including Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners last year, on the floor. Children have no place to play, so they play in the corridors or on the stairs. They play amid drug dealers, rats and piles of garbage.
”It`s noisy all the time, even at 3 a.m. You hear the voices of children echoing through the halls. You hear the echoes of the metal doors slamming. These children are refugees of war, an undeclared war.”
The war is being fought under absurd, self-defeating rules. The city government pays the owners of the Martinique the equivalent of $1,900-a-month (for one room for a family of four) to $3,000 (for two rooms for a family of six) to operate the hotel as a shelter. At the same time, the maximum monthly rent provided by welfare for a family of three, with no subsidies, is $244; for a family of four, $270. Many stay at the shelter for months.
”If the government were to raise these limits by $100, sufficient to approach the lowest rents in New York City, the cost would still be less than one-fifth what is spent for hotel rentals,” Kozol writes.
But there are fewer and fewer dwellings with rents that are low enough for poor Americans. A question we must ask ourselves, he said, is whether this nation believes that having a home is the right of every citizen.
As Kozol speaks, there is a knock at the door. A room-service waiter has brought a fresh, unsolicited supply of ice. Obviously ambivalent about the lavish quarters provided by his publisher, Kozol smiles ruefully. The Martinique Hotel seems very far away.
–
Maybe it is his slender build or his glasses with those little round gold frames from the `60s, but sometimes in photographs Kozol looks diffident, meek.
We should not be misled by appearances. The guy is about as meek as an Old Testament prophet.
Indeed, if you have read his books, it is not hard to imagine him in those times. He is standing on a low hill, speaking to a throng. He is warning the crowd about the consequences of their selfishness, deploring the widespread greed and ungodliness and challenging everyone to lead lives that are just and charitable.
That is pretty much what Kozol, 51, has been doing for two decades. Instead of speaking from low hills, however, he comes at us from the printed page, his words grabbing us by our shoulders and shaking us, trying to get us to do what is right, to measure up to our highest standards.
He has written seven books, serious books about serious subjects. He has been called a polemicist and a gadfly; he is, essentially, a moralist and an idealist. He believes that our society, and each of us, will be judged by the way we treat the least among us, the weak, the helpless, the poor.
From the beginning, his focus has been children and the damage done to them and their families by poverty, injustice and the failings of our educational system.
He first gained national attention in 1967 with an account of his year as a 4th-grade teacher in Boston`s black Roxbury neighborhood. White racism, he wrote, permeated the Boston school system.
”Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools” won the National Book Award; more than 2 million copies have been sold, and last year New American Library released it in its 28th printing.
His sixth book, ”Illiterate America,” in 1985 told of the appalling number of Americans who cannot read: one-third of the adult population. This country, which we like to proclaim as the greatest on Earth, ranks 49th in the world in its literacy rate, he said.
Kozol is not a detached, dispassionate observer. His books smolder with indignation. He is a hands-on author who gets close to the people he writes about, who wants his readers to care as much as he cares.
His way tends to work: Critics from the beginning have lauded his ability to stir the reader`s anger.
But some critics find fault in his fervor; for them, it is not so much the case he makes as the manner in which he presents it. As one wrote:
”. . . Kozol presumes to lecture us, as if he were the only person around with the vision and the moral credentials to inform us that good people are suffering.”
Kozol is familiar with this form of attack: ”It`s always a little difficult to remind myself that this has happened before, but it has.
”At first, `Death at an Early Age` was damned, like all my books. The initial reviews were very harsh.
”The standard criticism is that I`m overly passionate.
”After it won the National Book Award, I was treated with a little more kindness by the literary establishment. Temporarily I was forgiven for my passion. Since that time, every book I write is reviewed in the same way.
”It`s always a paraphrase of the original reviews except now they always start out like this: `Once again, Jonathan Kozol has found a moving story to tell. Unlike his earlier classic, however, this book shows an excess of emotion. . . .` They don`t remember that`s what they also said about that so- called earlier classic.”
–
Kozol had a privileged childhood in Newton, Mass., a Boston suburb. His father was a doctor, his mother a psychiatric social worker; the politics at home were progressive.
After attending an Episcopal prep school (”I think I was the second Jewish kid to go there”), he entered Harvard University, where he studied creative writing for two years with poet Archibald MacLeish. Kozol majored in English with the intention of becoming an English professor and teaching poetry.
After graduation he went to Oxford University in England, where he had won a Rhodes Scholarship, but left after a few months to live in Paris and write a novel.
”I`d spent a great deal of my life in insulated situations, and I felt cut off from the lives of ordinary people. I lived in poor, working-class neighborhoods in Paris for four years, not by choice but by necessity, and I learned a lot from the experience.”
When he returned to this country in 1963, he felt somewhat lost and uncertain. His friends were in medical school or law school or had good jobs, and he was a writer who had not published a book.
One spring day in 1964, when he pretty well had resolved that he would get a doctorate and teach English literature in a university, he saw a sign in Harvard Yard asking for volunteers to tutor children in a summer program in Roxbury.
He found that he loved teaching; he loved being with children. In September he became a teacher in the Boston school system.
”I kept a journal, and a year later I found I`d written a book. I`d finally lived through something that was worth writing about.”
The unpublished novel he began in Paris and hopes to finish someday is about his grandmother, Rebecca Kozol. She came here from Russia, fleeing the pogrom in a cattle truck, crossing the Atlantic in steerage with an infant son, Kozol`s uncle.
”My grandfather was a tailor, and my grandmother started a little clothing store. They were refugees from terror. But unlike the people at the Martinique, they found what they were looking for.
”Grandmother Kozol was important in my life. She was an Orthodox Jew, and she took her religion very, very seriously. When I was teaching in Boston and sometimes couldn`t understand why things were so unfair, I used to go to her home on Friday nights. She was a widow then. We`d light (Sabbath) candles, have a glass of wine and she would prepare dinner for us.
”I wasn`t terribly diligent about my religious education, and what I got of it, I got directly from her.”
Kozol, who is divorced and has no children, spends much of his time on the road, lecturing.
”In a sense, I practice my religion in homeless shelters and airports, but I take it seriously now. After visiting for two years in the Martinique, it would be difficult not to feel religious.
”One woman I met there said she wasn`t religious when she came to the Martinique, but it had made her that way. `People become religious here,` she said, `because each day you survive seems like a miracle.` ”
–
”Since 1980,” Kozol said, ”it`s become almost fashionable to be punitive in our words about poor people. Unwittingly, this means we`ve been speaking harshly about children.”
According to several studies, small children are the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population, whose numbers have increased dramatically since 1980. (Forty percent of the poor in America are children, although they comprise only 25 percent of the population.)
There is no question that our government policies have been punitive, Kozol said. He presents figures showing that in the first four years of the Reagan administration, budget cuts affecting poor children totaled more than $19 billion.
”I think a democracy that demonstrates so much apparent contempt for children, even if it`s unintended, imperils its future. There`s a lot of kindness in this country, but for some reason, we Americans have been anesthetized to our own compassion in the last eight years. We`ve built a high wall around ourselves, or otherwise we`d all burst into tears.”
Whenever social concerns are raised, people invariably point to the complexity of the issues and their potential solutions, but on one level, Kozol said, homelessness is not that complicated.
He writes: ”The cause of homelessness is lack of housing. Half a million units of low-income housing are lost every year to condominium conversion, abandonment, arson, demolition.”
In addition, federal funds to build or rehabilitate low-income housing have been reduced to $9 billion from $28 billion between 1981 and 1986. He cites a study showing that for each $1 authorized for defense in 1980, 19 cents went to subsidized-housing programs. In 1984, 3 cents went to housing for every $1 spent on the military.
”We don`t know how to end poverty in America,” Kozol said. ”We don`t quite understand what`s happening to the job market, which is changing; we don`t know exactly what to do about the welfare system.
”But we do know how to build houses. We`re clever people. If we want to do it, we`ll do it fast. If we don`t want to do it, then we should stop looking at the character of the homeless and start looking at ourselves.
”When people talk harshly about the poor, when they say, `Why can`t they be like me? We worked hard and made it,` I wonder if they realize they`re talking about children?
”It`s distasteful to raise the cost-effectiveness argument, but we`re going to pay for this someday. What we`re doing at the Martinique is crazy. We`re wasting taxpayers` money to keep people in a Charles Dickens poorhouse. . . .
”It bewilders me. Most of the people I meet in America are compassionate. Why is it that individually we can be so compassionate and collectively we can be so harsh?
”I don`t understand that. I don`t have an answer to that.”
