Boston Boy: Growing up with Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions

by Nat Hentoff

Boston Boy is Nat Hentoff's memoir of growing up in the Roxbury section of Boston in the 1930s and 1940s. He grapples with Judaism and anti-Semitism. He develops a passion for outspoken journalism and First Amendment freedom of speech. And he discovers his love of jazz music as he follows, and is befriended by, the great jazz musicians of the day, including Duke Ellington and Lester Young among others. "This memoir of [Hentoff's] youth should be appreciated not only by adults who grew up through the fires of their own youthful rebellion, but by those restless young people who are now bringing their own views and questions to the world they are inheriting. They could learn from this example that rebels can be gentle as well as enraged and compassionate in their commitment."— New York Times Book Review "Nat Hentoff knows jazz. And it comes alive in this wonderful, touching memoir."—Ken Burns, creator of the PBS series Jazz "[A] charmingly bittersweet memoir."— Boston Globe "This is a touching book about a painful, wonderful time in Boston…I loved it."—Anthony Lewis Nat Hentoff  was born in Boston in 1925 and lived there until he moved to New York City at the age of twenty-eight. For many years he has written a weekly column for the Village Voice . His column for the Washington Times is syndicated in 250 newspapers, and he writes regularly about music for the Wall Street Journal . For twenty-five years, he was a staff writer for the New Yorker and for many years was a columnist for the  Washington Post . His numerous books cover subjects ranging from jazz music and musicians to civil rights and civil liberties, on which he is a recognized authority. He was jazz critic at  Down Beat  and has written liner notes for many important jazz recordings. His work has won him honors not only from the music industry, but also from the American Bar Association and the American Library Association.

Genres: Music, Jazz, History, Nonfiction, Memoir, Journalism, Biography

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Nathan Irving "Nat" Hentoff was a historian, novelist, music critic, and syndicated columnist. As a civil libertarian and free-speech activist, he has been described by the Cato Institute—where he has been a senior fellow since 2009—as "one of the foremost authorities on the First Amendment" to the U.S. Constitution. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker for over 25 years, and was formerly a columnist for The Village Voice for over 50 years, in addition to Legal Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and The Progressive, among others. Since 2014, he has been a regular contributor to the conservative Christian website WorldNetDaily, often in collaboration with his son Nick Hentoff.

Hentoff was a Fulbright Fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in education in 1972. The American Bar Association bestowed the Silver Gavel Award in 1980 for his columns on law and criminal justice, and five years later his undergraduate alma mater, Northeastern University, awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Law degree. While working at the Village Voice in 1995, the National Press Foundation granted him the W.M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award. He was a 1999 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary, "for his passionate columns championing free expression and individual rights," which was won by Maureen Dowd. In 2004 he became the first non-musician to be named an NEA Jazz Master by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.

Hentoff lectured at many colleges, universities, law schools, elementary, middle and high schools, and has taught courses in journalism and the U.S. Constitution at Princeton University and New York University. He serves on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.) and is on the steering committee of the Reporters' Committee for the Freedom of the Press.

Reviews

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reread this recently to commemorate Nat Hentoff's recent passing, and enjoyed it more than I did when I first read it.
The essence of this book is its stories. Like the great jazz musicians whose music he loved, Nat Hentoff could tell a captivating story. They told their stories through music and he told his with words.

[John Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nat Hentoff's autobiography of his early years is an fascinating story. I grew up in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston and Hentoff gives a perspective that is different from mine in some ways and typically Boston in others. He writes about how segregated Boston was and he is right but I never thought about it back then. It is interesting to get another view of Boston. I am not very interested in jazz but Hentoff makes me think I'm missing something.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly good memoir by an author I had only previously associated with jazz criticism. Assured, confident, and not at all self-important, he describes growing up in Roxbury, MA, the section of Boston then known as a sort of Jewish ghetto for newly arrived eastern European Jews. He calls himself a heretic, for his estrangement from Judaism and swimming against the stream in many other things; but can celebrate his feelings upon his son’s bar mitzvah; and he can also identify strongly with the life of a well educated US intellectual and skeptic. The book gives a lot of good history and detail on a particular era of Boston history that I found very interesting.

[Scott Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun memoir about growing up Jewish in Roxbury/Boston in the 30s and 40s. It had a lot of great anecdotes and funny stories. My cousin Mel grew up kicking around jazz clubs with Nat back then so I've always wanted to read this. It was enjoyable.

[Patrick Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Nat...His writing is great,his stories both funny and heartbreaking,and his political conscience is right on the money...

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nat Hentoff writes (or did) in the Village Voice...neat biography!

[Scputval · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent and entertaining - very well written

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nat Hentoff was a bit of a 20th-century American free-speech hero, a Boston Jewish son of Russian immigrants who was bulled as a youth by the Irish-Catholic neighborhood thugs, but studious enough to rise above his modest roots to find a out way out through education. A strong traditional liberal, he eventually became one of the country's most respected music critics: a champion of jazz and black American and roots music, a strong advocate for civil rights, and a staunch defender of true free speech. He was the kind of ACLU member who believed that people could say whatever they wanted, or express themselves accordingly -- no matter how odious their positions -- and if Nazis or KKK members wanted to march through Jewish neighborhoods in Skokie, Illinois, or wherever, with proper police accompaniment to keep order, he defended their rights to do so, despite his Jewish upbringing and personal beliefs. Tolerance, he believed, was part of the equation in democracy's messy marketplace of ideas, and in a world becoming more progressive, he trusted that the best ideas would win out. What was important was to be passionate and articulate enough to speak out, and fight the noble way.

Hentoff believed in individual rights and freedoms, not group identity politics. Eventually, he had a falling out with the Left because its tactics and its principles became too narrow and too much like the fascistic Right-wingers he despised, and that's a process that continues apace after his 2017 death. Hentoff wrote a book I much admire, called Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee, a title which alone pretty much summarizes his views. In it, he gives examples from both the Right and the Left of speech suppression and censorship. Hentoff criticized Democrats and Republicans with equal gusto, and he remained firm to the end, so much so that he didn't have very many friends left on either side of the spectrum, but he was consistent, and, in my opinion, he was, on balance, correct.

This autobiography about his early years -- the 1930s through roughly the mid '50s -- tells us how he came to develop his taste in the arts, his fascination with marginalized cultures, and his social conscience. One theme repeated throughout the book is Hentoff's idea that the music of the cantor, or hazzan or chazzan of the Jewish liturgy contains the same emotion and anguish as the feeling found in blues and jazz.

The book is not badly written on a sentence-by-sentence basis but is, alas, ever-so-slightly dullish. There are pages upon pages of dubiously interesting anecdotes about working at the candy store and attending the Boston Latin school and so forth, and it's not as interesting as he might have thought it was. I was frankly most interested in how he developed his political views and his love of music. There are interesting stories about his early investigative reporting of anti-Semitic hate groups, and of political and police corruption in Boston, along with his fledgling exposure to the jazz music scene. Hentoff was no intellectual lightweight; he attended Harvard and then the Sorbonne on a Fullbright scholarship. One mark of shame on Hentoff's record -- one he owns up to and admits in the book -- is that he did offer names to an anti-Communist Senator during the fearsome times of the McCarthy witch hunts. Hentoff himself was an anti-Communist as much as he was an anti-fascist (he didn't see much difference between totalitarian systems), but faltered here in the confusion. Regardless of whether the names he named were already established ones on the lists in question, he knew he'd been complicit.

Despite such illuminating moments, the book on the whole feels tangential and lacks flow and bounces around the time-line quite often, and I struggled to stay engaged with the narrative. The stories of his jazz encounters don't jibe well in the autobiographical mix and feel like they ought to constitute a separate book where they could be more fully developed. There are some nice anecdotes about famous musicians he knew, such as Billie Holiday and Dave Brubeck, and these kept me from snoozing at times. The book feels a bit skeletal, like something he felt he had to get on the record, rather than something crafted into a scintillating story.

eg,kr '19

[Kevin A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nat Hentoff was such a natural contrarian, this book can be at times irritating, but never boring. His time in the Boston “Shtetl” of Roxbury lasted from his birth in 1925 until he left to become New York editor of Down Beat in 1953. In between he was a Boston Latin and Northeastern student, an investigative reporter, and an all-purpose radio announcer. (His specialty was jazz, naturally, but he did news, sports, and whatever else needed doing.) He was never entirely content in any box he found himself — the Jewish neighborhood he escaped at first opportunity, experiencing the antiSemitism of the Irish toughs or the Brahmin institutions he patronized, being of the Left but anti-Communist — yet there is still some affection in these reminiscences.

[Joyce Kozol · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great memoir of a man who grew up in Boston in a time of blatant antisemitism . All the plucky things he did to earn a living and stay out of the “looney bin”are delivered by a brilliant ,jazz loving Jewish boy in Boston. It’s the Boston I had heard about growing up and now can appreciate it through the eyes of the Boston Boy.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book because from another book I learned about Frances Sweeney- a Catholic journalist who defended Jews in Boston back in the 30s-40s. But Hentoffs memoir was about so much more- I loved the history, the jazz - though I know nothing of jazz, and just of his life. Very readable.

An unexpected enjoyable surprise.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable memoir that made me think of my grandfather, but didn't pull me through.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am sure I would have liked this book better if I knew more about jazz.

[Rona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nat just died. It brought me back to his memoir of his early years in Jewish, working-class Boston. He wrote beautifully about many things not so beautiful.

[Mark Goddard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nat Hentoff writes about growing up in Boston in the 40's & 50's. Antisemitism and Racism rages in the clubs and back alleys of the Back Bay. Entertaining stories about Mayor Curley, Lady Day and Lester Young. Fascinating book, Highly recommended

[Don Kaplan]

Given to me by a fellow author because of my interest in Jazz and Boston. Liked it a lot.