NONFICTION - Dec. 25, 1994

THE VIEW FROM MOUNT MORRIS: A Harlem Boyhood by John Sanford (Barricade Books: $22; 231 pp.). John Sanford, now 90, between 1939 and 1964 published books with Alfred A. Knopf, Harcourt Brace, Doubleday, and W. W. Norton; since 1976 he’s published a dozen more books, none with a major publishing house. It’s conceivable that these more recent titles had less merit than his earlier work . . . but I doubt it, for if “The View From Mt. Morris” is any indication, Sanford is the sort of author publishing houses should support regardless of the sales figures. The book is both a boy’s eye view of adult life and homage to a distant age, an altogether charming collection of portraits from Jewish life in Harlem between 1910 and 1920. The author’s widowed father, Phil: a man of courage and humor who liked to say, “A chip on the shoulder usually comes from a wooden head.” Phil’s brothers-in-law: Uncle Dave, a peripatetic Communist who sent cigars and a Panama hat to the imprisoned Eugene V. Debs; Uncle Harry, exploitative low-life who ate “as though merely filling a sack with sand”; Uncle Romie, who when not being sent away to institutions himself--he was retarded--sent away for every free sample available through magazine coupons. The author’s mean-spirited, deeply Orthodox Aunt Sarah: “You killed my son! Killed!” she tells Sanford, since he had introduced cousin Melvin to his future wife, a Gentile. Natchie Weinstein: tall and clumsy, a “lifelong clunchfist” but bright, too, always reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, thus foreshadowing his future success as Nathanael West. As it turns out, neither Sarah nor West is as important to Sanford’s story as Aunt Rae, for she effectively breaks up the family by convincing the teen-aged John Sanford that his father is betraying the boy’s dead mother by remarrying. Phil and his second wife rent a new apartment . . . but John refuses to join them, Rae having alchemized his pain into poison. Sanford’s understated guilt over this episode give “The View From Mount Morris” shape, substance, feeling, a little drama and above all a reason for being--altogether, much more than you typically find in a memoir, and with much less dross.