The World in a City cover

Author Joseph Berger spoke Oct. 16 about his new book at the 92nd Street Y, bringing to life his own experiences and those shared by immigrants in New York City.

A long-time reporter for the New York Times, Berger based the book, “The World in a City,” on articles he wrote for the paper spanning the broad topic of immigration yet by introducing scenes and characters, like the cobbler in Chinatown and the part-time nanny from the Bronx, explores the issue on a neighborhood level.

The discussion was moderated by Berger’s former colleague at the Times’s religion desk, Daily News columnist and professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University Ari Goldman.

The talk, just like the book, began with the story of a young and recently immigrated Berger, his brother and a friend exploring New York City by foot in the early 1950s, and both progress to show haw the city has changed in the last half-century.

The city was a mix of “European beige” during his childhood, but now with 60 percent of the city’s population being immigrants or the children of immigrants, one can visit “25 different countries for the cost of a MetroCard,” Berger explained. This is a paradigm of what is happening in the rest of the country, he continued.

Berger noted that the rich variety of race helps immigrants adjust to the city’s own history has been built upon immigration since the first Dutch and English settlers arrived nearly 400 years ago. He argued that New York City lacks the sense of nationalism and xenophobia known in Paris and offers a more fluid class system than London as two reasons immigrant populations today mesh relatively well with each other today here and not there. He illustrated the idea with an example of Brazilians and Middle Easterners living together in Astoria, Queens.

The ethnic diversity of immigrants entering the City is not the only change Berger has witnessed, for advancements in technology have made it easier for immigrants in New York to contact and keep in touch with family and friends in their countries of origin. One example described in the talk as well as the book is of a husband and wife living in the Bronx in 2005 speaking to their children in Ecuador via an internet and video feed and a television. Their children showed off their gown-up bodies in new clothes (it had been years since the whole family had seen each other) and they showed off the evidence of a new brother on the way; a pregnant belly.

(In the 1950s, Berger’s own mother had to wait weeks for replies to letters sent via air mail to her aunt in Poland.)

Berger believes that immigrants who have recently arrived and who are on their way will continue the pattern of previous immigrant generations who merged with and assimilated into the life of the City.

“The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York” is available in stores and includes short guide to where to go and what to eat in each neighborhood visited.