March 2022
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Of the many Brooklyn novels that I've read this last while, Big Man, by Jay Neugeboren, comes closest to home. Neugeboren was newborn in 1938, just a year before me, and he attended fabled Erasmus Hall High School, most likely graduating with the class of 1955 (I was '56). It's a mark of my ignorance…
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It should be remembered and recorded that in October of 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt herself visited the home of my parents –my childhood home (539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn). I myself missed the occasion, alas. I was then living in Massachusetts, undergoing the first disorienting days of graduate school. But I…
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Of course everyone knew that Sid Luckman was from Brooklyn and that he had attended Erasmus Hall High School and Columbia University before becoming one of the first superstars of the National Football League. To football fans, he was as renowned a home-town boy as Sandy Koufax was to followers of baseball. But until I…
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Girl in Translation is the story of a young, impoverished immigrant from Hong Kong. I may be wrong, but it reads as if it were less a novel than a barely fictionalized autobiography (Jean Kwok, the author, made her way from an unheated tenement to Harvard; Kimberley Chang, the central figure, escaped to Yale.) Mutatis…
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On our prosperous Boulder Mall, where all the men are handsome, all the women are good-looking, and all the mendicants take Venmo, there are 44 separate signs that declare, No Pets. Such signs do not inhibit our infatuated dog owners, who can't bring themselves to believe that the injunction applies to their particular o so…
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I liked Paul Auster's, The Brooklyn Follies (2006) so much that I read it twice. It was even better the second time. Even though it begins scary ("I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn…."), it's a cheerful and warm-hearted novel. Auster's gift is to make barely credible events seem commonplace…