A Brooklyn Memoir: My Life as a Boy

From the final days of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-1950s to the arrival of the Beatles in 1964, A Brooklyn Memoir is an unsentimental journey through one New York City neighborhood. Though only a 20-minute and 15-cent subway ride from the gleaming towers of Manhattan across the East River, Flatbush remained provincial and working class--a place where Auschwitz survivors and W.W. II vets lived side by side and the war lingered like a mass hallucination.

Meet Bobby, a local kid who shares a shabby apartment with his status-conscious mother, who longs for a house in the suburbs, and his bigoted father, a soda jerk haunted by memories of the Nazi death camp he helped liberate. Flatbush, to Bobby, is a world of brawls with neighborhood "punks," Hebrew school tales of Adolf Eichmann's daring capture, and grade school duck-and-cover drills. Drawn to images of mushroom clouds and books about executions, Bobby ultimately turns the seething hatred he senses everywhere against himself.

From a perch in his father's candy store, Bobby provides a child's-eye view of the mid-20th-century American experience--a poignant intertwining of the personal and historical.

Characters include:

Bobby's father, Irwin, a World War II infantry veteran who liberated a concentration camp and now co-owns a candy store famous for its egg creams, where Bobby sometimes works. Irwin recalls the war as the best days of his life and is consumed by a hatred of both Nazis and minorities.

Bobby's mother, Eleanor, an artistically inclined housewife, bitter about her shabby apartment, her status in the lower middle class, and the fact that her husband is a "soda jerk" rather than the respected professional she feels Jewish law entitled her to marry.

Bobby's grandfather Isidor, who once wanted to be a rabbi but now has a taste for adultery and runs a bookmaking operation out of the candy store, which he co-owns with Irwin. His arrest by the vice squad brings shame upon the family.

Bobby's grandmother Helen, who was born on a shtetl on St. Patrick's Day and believes all goyim are good-for-nothing drunkards--except for President Kennedy, who she thinks is so handsome that "his looks transcended his goyishness." After a nervous breakdown she's subjected to electroshock therapy.

Bobby's uncle Paul, a minority-hating closeted homosexual who makes a fortune selling women's clothing, wears bespoke suits, drives a Cadillac, and travels to Las Vegas "like an honorary member of the Rat Pack."