I know that when you’re planning your books, you write a couple paragraphs for yourself that explain what the books are about, and then you use those paragraphs as a North Star to guide your writing and outlining. I just saw “Fiddler on the Roof” again, twice, and I have seldom felt worse than when they got to that song. None of that is left in the published book. And at some point when I was working on that section, I saw “Fiddler on the Roof.” There’s a song called “Anatevka,” and the line in the center is “Anatevka,/Where I know everyone I meet./Soon I’ll be a stranger in a strange new place,/Searching for an old familiar face.” So I wrote a chapter in “The Power Broker” called “One Mile (Afterward),” and in it I wrote about what it’s like to be lonely, to have a neighborhood all your life, and then you’re suddenly dispersed. 2 When I was working on “The Power Broker,” I’d be interviewing people from that neighborhood who were forced to move away, and the word “lonely” kept reappearing in my notes. What happened to them is the same thing that happened to people in East Tremont. But then they get an edict from the czar saying they have to be dispersed. These people have their community, and as long as they have that, they have a lot.
It’s about a poor Jewish village called Anatevka. What’s the stuff you most wished you could’ve left in? I don’t know if you’re familiar with “Fiddler on the Roof?” You famously have to cut huge chunks 1 of material out of your books before they’re ready to be published.
“I feel that I’ve learned about researching power, about how power is obtained, about power is used and how it’s abused,” Caro says, “and I wanted to share some things.” “Working” isn’t meant to be a career capstone for Caro - he’s still plugging away on a final, feverishly anticipated Johnson book - but it is, he explains, a kind of summation. Caro, of course, is responsible for two totems of American political biography: “The Power Broker,” about the New York public servant Robert Moses, responsible for nearly 50 years of sweeping development projects, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” a multivolume account of the life of the 36th president.
But the fruits of that labor aren’t exactly ho-hum. Yes, the 83-year-old’s book is a precise and detailed set of recollections about his painstaking, near-mythically thorough job of researching, interviewing, and writing about political figures. Caro’s “Working” is both humbly straightforward and almost comically understated.
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