Yesterday’s New York Times offered a journalistic walking tour through the Hasidic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The piece opens with promises of “anachronistic pleasure”: knife grinders and bearded men in 19th-century garb. The cumulative effect, tour guide Alan Feuer suggests, is a world “lost to time.” One problem: the romanticized introduction seems starkly at odds with the descriptions of the stroll that follows. A restaurant serving pizza and falafel? Wines for as much as $200? Apparently Satu Mare, Romania, the ancestral home of the Satmars of Williamsburg, was a hipper place than we thought.
↧