How does Alfred Kazin use imagery in A Walker in the City?

Imagery:

"... we were Brownsville ... the dust of the earth to all Jews with money, and notoriously a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it."

"...so varnished-clean and empty and austere ... so severely reserved above the altar and in the set rows of wooden pews to the service of an enigmatic cult, that the chief impression it made on me, who expected all Christians to be as fantastic as albinos, was that these people were not, apparently, so completely different from us as I had imagined."