JONATHAN KOZOL’S CRYING GAME

But Kozol’s tears are more than an outpouring of emotion, they are his bona fides, proof that his research into the lives of the poor — no matter how seemingly fraudulent — must be true, if only because it moves him so strongly. Of course, tears also sell books. A sobbing author makes for a great marketing strategy. And perhaps no writer in America has worked that strategy more effectively, turing moral outrage into dollars and prestige, than Jonathan Kozol.

So it’s no surprise that he keeps churning out tears. “Sometimes… ! didn’t feel like writing anything,” he explained to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1992 while on book tour flogging his then-best-seller, Savage Inequalities. “I just felt like crying.”

Three years later, Kozol is as lachrymose as ever. Indeed, the publication of his latest book, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, an account of life in a South Bronx neighborhood, appears to have set the author off on another binge of sobbing.

“I spent much of the last two years crying,” he told Editor and Publisher magazine in one of the countless media profiles and reviews timed to coincide with the new book’s release. “I cried a lot, you can’t avoid it,” he lamented to the Seattle Times (which in turn described Kozol as the ” nation’s most revered oracle for impoverished children”). It’s a wonder the book ever got written at all, he explained to the Dallas Morning News, since he had to stop so frequently to “sit quietly and cry.” “It’s a very sad story, and I cried a lot while I was writing it, and a lot of people tell me they cry when they read it,” he confided to Charlie Rose last month. ” Sometimes you feel so close to tears that you lack the, the will to, to scream.”

But for Jonathan Kozol crying solo is never enough. Others have to join in, too. “I have no wish for people to read this book and come away from it full of hope,” he told the Associated Press in November. “I simply want people to weep. weep and pray and ask for forgiveness for what they have done to these children.” Misti Snow, an aptly-named staff writer at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, seemed happy to oblige. In a review of Amazing Grace this fall, she noted that “it takes longer than one would think to read this book. One must take time to weep.” T

hey may have been getting teary at the Star Tribune, but at Kozol’s publishing house the mood was considerably lighter. Amazing Grace had just gone into its sixth printing, bringing the total number of copies in circulation to 125,000. Kozol had once again bawled his way onto the bestseller list.

Like many professional advocates for the poor, Kozol comes from a privileged background. The son of a prominent psychiatrist (his father testified as an expert witness at the Patty Hearst trial) and a social worker, Kozol grew up in tony Newton, Massachusetts. After preparing at one of the better private schools in the area, he went to Harvard and studied writing under poet and former assistant secretary of State Archibald MacLeish. Kozol then enrolled at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Leaving early to become a novelist, he spent the next four years living in Paris — for a time in the same Latin Quarter hotel as Beat writers William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg — trying unsuccessfully to produce a book about his Russian immigrant grandmother.

In 1963, Kozol returned to the United States with plans of becoming a lawyer. By the fall of 1964, however, he had changed course and begun work as a temporary teacher in a public elementary school i n Roxbury, a poor section of Boston. The nearly all-black school was in dismal shape, with crumbling classrooms and bigoted, sadistic teachers. For the sheltered son of suburban doctor, it was a traumatic experience — “I’ve never returned in any real sense,” he told an interviewer nearly 30 years later.

He began to keep a journal of his experiences. By the time he was fired six months later — for, in the words cf school authorities, “continual deviation from the th grade course of study” — his diary approached book length. It was published soon after under the title Death at an Early Age. The account was a surprise bestseller, winning the National Book Award and launching Kozol’s career as author and social critic.

A stream of other books followed, which Kozol cranked out between jobs as an itinerant college lecturer and organizer for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. All were roughly in the mold of Death at an Early Age — part reportage, part policy paper, held together with a goo of angry adjectives and leftist aphorisms. Kozol’s politics seemed to get more extreme with time. “I am in strongest possible opposition to the present social order of the U.S.,” he wrote in his 1975 The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home. He went on to describe the pledge of allegiance as “a ritual of unforgivable deceit.” (These weren’t just youthfully intemperate words, either. In 1992, Kozol called The Night Is Dark “by far my best book.”) His 1978 Children of the Revolution is a paean to Fidel Castro, whose literacy programs Kozol called a “pedagogical victory unheralded in the modern world.”

In Illiterate America, published in 1985, Kozol claimed that a third of the adult population, 60 million Americans (the Census Bureau’s estimate at the time was between 17 and 21 million), was unable to read because of a plot by Big Business and the Reagan administration to keep the workers ignorant. ” Who can pretend that literacy is not political?” he asked in conspiratorial tones. “It does not require a radical perspective to recognize that those who have a firm hold on the market of American ideas will not foster an ability to question the ideologies they live by.”

His 1988 book about homelessness, Rachel and Her Children was so overheated that even Anna Quindlen panned it in the New York Times as ” advocacy journalism.” As if to prove her point, Kozol held a news conference shortly after the book was published to warn of imminent housing riots. “This many poor families — mothers, fathers, children — are not going to remain silent and passive forever,” he cautioned. “There is enormous anger building up in these shelters and in the streets.”

Ordinarily, an author still droning on in the 1990s about conspiracies hatched by the military-industrial complex would find his audience limited to faculty members on lesser-known college campuses. His polemics would be dismissed by ordinary people as out-of-date or boring. Yet Kozol, almost alone among old-line leftists still publishing, has managed to avoid being typecast as a crank. And he has done it by identifying with — rather than simply writing about — poor people. Kozol, after all, doesn’t just research his books, he lives them, spending years in urban areas empathizing with the downtrodden before telling their story to an indifferent America — working, as he put it a few years ago, in his capacity as “the medium through which voiceless people make themselves heard.” “When I get tired,” he explained to the Washington Post recently, “I get on the subway and go to Boston, or get on the Number 6 train in New York and go up to the South Bronx, or in Washington go to Anacostia, and I just spend one hour sitting in the kitchen of one of the families I know. All the anger comes back.”

Jonathan Kozol, in other words, has the credibility that comes from first- hand experience on the streets. “In a serLse,” Kozol once told the Chicago Tribune, “I practice my religion in homeless shelters and airports.”

Kozol’s image as a tireless and truthful recorder of gritty urban reality has been accepted pretty much uncritizally, so it is surprising that key sections of his much-touted 1991 book on inner-city schools, Savage Inequalities, appear to have been written by other people. In places throughout the book, Kozol’s own, seemingly firsthand descriptions turn out to be thinly (and often inaccurately) rewritten versions of news stories. In other instances, Kozol seems to have simply lifted a reporter’s words verbatim, without benefit of quotation marks.

In the second chapter of Savage Inequalities, for instance, Kozol describes at length scenes from Goudy Elementary, a deteriorating public school in Chicago. But it is not clear that Kozol ever actually went to Goudy, since nearly all of his reporting seems to come straight from a 1988 Chicago Tribune series on urban schools. “There are no swings. Not even a rusted jungle gym,” reported the Tribune. “There are no swings. There is no jungle gym,” writes Kozol. “Soap, paper toweling and toilet paper are not always available for the children,” observed the Tribune. “Soap, paper towels and toilet paper are in short supply,” writes Kozol.

At one point, Kozol appropriates (without giving credit) a vignette from the Tribune about a little girl named Keisha who has punched a classmate in an argument over a crayon. In the Tribune version, a school counselor gently tries to reach the girl, who she fears is slipping away. “You know I care about you,” says the counselor. “You told me I was your favorite teacher, isn’t that what you said?” “You was until today,” the girl replies, “the tears spilling out of her eyes” and falling “onto a page in her math book.”

In the rewritten Kozol version, the same event becomes a parable about harsh institutional authority: “‘Keisha, look at me,” an adult shouts at a slow reader in a sixth grade class. “Look at me in the eye.’ Keisha has been fighting with her classmate. Over what? As it turns out, over a crayon. The child is terrified and starts to cry. Tears spill out of her eyes and onto the pages of her math book.”

Kozol goes on to contrast the barren atmosphere at Goudy Elementary with the lush abundance of New Trier, an affluent high school nearby. But Kozol doesn’t seem to have visited New Trier either. The only source for his many descriptions of the place appears to be a single article from Town and Country magazine.

“Kozol appears to have done no original reporting,” concluded writer Sara Mosle, who reviewed the book for New York Newsday in 1991. “In each city,” wrote Mosle, a former teacher and a self-described liberal, “he culls the local newspaper for anecdotes to support his preconceived notions.” For editors at Newsday, the apparent dishonesty was too much. According to Mosle, the editors, who had first serial rights, decided not to go ahead and publish excerpts of Savage Inequalities, even after Kozol filed a lawsuit to force them to.

Savage Inequalities isn’t the only book in which Kozol has employed dubious research techniques. Among the sources cited in Kozol’s latest work, Amazing Grace, are “a student written New York City periodical,” a Home Box Office video, and the translation of a screenplay for a 1947 French movie — that last being the source for an alleged quote from St. Vincent de Paul. At one point in Amazing Grace a young black man lays some street wisdom on Kozol’s mostly middle-class readers: “‘We know the real killer,” says a black musician in response to those who say that it is violent rap music that is spawning death and rage. “The killer is not a song. The killer is in the street in which we live like rats.'” A trip through the endnotes identifies this philosopher only as “unnamed rap musician cited, MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.”

Those characters in Amazing Grace who are identified by name frequently don’t sound much like people one is likely to meet in the South Bronx. Kozol has in the past defended himself against charges that he alters quotes by calling such criticism racist: Only a white bigot, he says, would doubt that poor children from the ghetto can speak like affluent kids who go to Exeter. Still, it’s hard not to hear strains of Harvard in some of the things Kozol’s characters say. “The drug dealers don’t have any power over the economy,” observes a 16-year-old named Maria by way of affixing blame for the city’s problems. “They don’t control the hospitals. They don’t run the schools and they don’t run New York.” “If you want to solve the problem” of poverty, offers Alice Washington, the AIDS-suffering (she got it from her husband) protagonist of Amazing Grace, “raise the taxes everywhere in the United States.” In another section, while describing the relative merits of New York’s daily newspapers, Washington says she prefers the New York Times, and ” will :not buy the New York Post.” “Why not?” asks Kozol. “It’s prejudiced,” she replies.

Washington’s son David proves equally politically aware. “Evil exists,” Kozol has him saying. “I believe that what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher would call evil.” In another place, railing against the injustice of inadequate health care, David describes routine practice in a local hospital: “As soon :,s they know that someone has TB they’re supposed to isolate him it. a room, but sometimes it’s a day or two before they get to him.” Maybe David actually said these things. Then again, when was the last time you heard any person under 50, no matter how well educated, use the correct pronoun — “him,” not “them” — with the antecedent “someone”?

Kozol admits he reconstructed some of the dialogue in Amazing Grace — ” much of the book wasn’t written as the result of interviews, but grow out of conversations,” he says — so it is easy to imagine that some of his own words may have ended up in the mouths of poor people he met. It has been suggested before. One magazine writer remembers reading an interview Kozol did with a young Puerto Rican boy “who I happened to have interviewed also on a different pretext. The kid sounded more Marxist in Kozol’s book than I had felt he was. It was striking to me because I thought, “Hey, I interviewed that kid.'”

If there is a single theme that runs through all of Kozol’s books — indeed, though his life — it is hatred and distrust of the affluent. The poor are not poor through any fault of their own, Kozol explains again and again, but because of the greed and hypocrisy of the rich. Kozol, who has never raised any kids of his own, relishes his role as protector of and spokesman for The Children. And it is the children, he says, who have suffered most so that the rest of us can “have the lowest possible taxes and enjoy our earnings to the full.”

Given how adamant he has been in his denunciations of the rich — Kozol routinely describes them as amoral monsters who “do not lead lives worth living” — it is interesting to note that Jonathan Kozol lives pretty well himself. While promoting his book about homelessness, for instance, Kozol didn’t bunk in shelters. In Chicago, he stayed in what the local newspaper called “a luxury hotel just off Michigan Avenue.” In Los Angeles, he bedded down in Beverly Hills. In Dallas last month pitching his new book, Kozol took a room at the Adolphus, one of the most expensive hotels in the city, whose rates start at more than $ 200 a night.

Not that Kozol has to worry about what hotel rooms cost. Over the years he has been amazingly successful at winning grants and awards, including two fellowships apiece from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. With the royalties from his books — all of which are still in print — it hasn’t been a bad living. But it isn’t writing that brings in the biggest checks. Like the Washington pundits he despises, Kozol makes his real money giving speeches.

According to his assistant, Cassie Schwerner, Kozol charges $ 12,500 per speaking engagement, far more than most authors receive. He also demands comprehensive travel expenses (full-fare coach tickets only, which make for an easy upgrade to first class). Despite the price, Kozol is in demand on the lecture circuit, particularly from teachers” organizations, whose champion he has been for 30 years. “I was one time asked to speak to a group of librarians in Ohio,” remembers Diane Ravitch, who also writes about education. “They told me they really wanted Jonathan Kozol but they couldn’t afford him, so they had settled for me.”

Affluent as he may be, Kozol does his best to hide it, with a studied indifference to wealth whenever reporters come near. “They take me to fancy restaurants in Midtown Manhattan, but I lose my appetite,” Kozol told New York Times writer Peter Appleborne over a $ 2.35 tunafish sandwich at the ostentatiously low-brow B & V pizza shop in the South Bronx. “It just seems strange. I’d rather be here. My digestion is better.” Declining an invitation to attend President Clinton’s inauguration, Kozol made a show of his simplicity for a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, explaining, ” I don’t have a tuxedo.”

Kozol has been making similar statements for most of his life. Twenty years ago, he described how he felt after spending the afternoon in an affluent friend’s house, a property he estimated at the time was worth about $ 100,000: “It occurs to me, as I am sitting here, that this would make a nice school . . . a good, removed and isolated rest house for narcotics addicts . . . a wonderful location for intensive, residential health care for malnourished, worm-infested, tick-infected, navel-distended infants.” His own home, he told a reporter recently, is a terribly modest affair, “a shack.”

Actually, the Kozol residence, a colonial farmhouse in rural Massachusetts, is much more than a shack. Two years ago the property’s assessed value was almost $ 200,000. Local Realtors says its real value is probably at least 20 percent more, making it one of the more expensive houses in town.

But such details are hardly the point. In Kozol’s world, good people naturally come off as poor — whether they are or not. One of the more memorable characters in his latest book, for instance, is an Episcopal priest, Martha Overall, pastor of St. Ann’s Church in the South Bronx. Like Kozol, the Rev. Overall has nothing but disdain for the well-off a:ad, like him, has made a career rich in media appearances out of identifying with the underclass. But, it turns out, empathy only goes so far. Overall, of course, doesn’t live in the South Bronx. She only works there, commuting to the ghetto each day from the most exclusive section of Manhattan, the Upper East Side. Needless to say, Kozol doesn’t mention this inconvenient fact in his book — indeed, he quotes Overall making remarks about the moral deficiencies of the people who live in wealthy parts of Manhattan. Not that her home address L,; hard to come by. It can be found right in the Social Register, where this committed redistributionist is a long-time listee. (“There are some poor people in the Social Register, too,” she says, explaining why she doesn’t plan to take her name out of the book.)

Asked about the apparent discrepancy between his ideology and his affection for fancy hotel rooms, Kozol explains that he’s no hypocrite, but actually a victim of American capitalism. “You can try to make your life as austere as possible,” he says, “but there’s no way of escaping the contradictions of our society. If you’re trying to engage in the cultural and political debates that exist in America today, you have to do it on the same terms as the people on the other side of the political spectrum.” In other words, if William F. Buckley, Jr. stays at the Plaza, Kozol is forced to as well. “This is how America works today,” Kozol says gravely.

Not that he likes it of course.

“Sometimes,” he says, after checking into one swanky inn or another, “it would startle me to come into an elaborate-looking lobby.” So, ever resourceful, Kozol came up with a solution: “Whenever I could, I would invite the homeless, people I was writing about, to come and visit me.” That way, he says, “they could enjoy a few moments of enjoying a pretty lobby.”

It’s enough to bring tears to your eyes. ,

By Tucker Carlson