A Brooklyn Memoir: My Life as a Boy
A darkly comic and deeply moving story of a New York City lost to time.

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 rough-and-tumble working-class neighborhood. Though only a 20-minute and 15-cent subway ride from the gleaming towers of Manhattan across the East River, Flatbush remained insular and provincial—a place where Auschwitz survivors and WWII 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 and 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.

From the bestselling author of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

Formerly published under the title Bobby in Naziland.
1140402493
A Brooklyn Memoir: My Life as a Boy
A darkly comic and deeply moving story of a New York City lost to time.

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 rough-and-tumble working-class neighborhood. Though only a 20-minute and 15-cent subway ride from the gleaming towers of Manhattan across the East River, Flatbush remained insular and provincial—a place where Auschwitz survivors and WWII 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 and 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.

From the bestselling author of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

Formerly published under the title Bobby in Naziland.
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A Brooklyn Memoir: My Life as a Boy

A Brooklyn Memoir: My Life as a Boy

by Robert Rosen
A Brooklyn Memoir: My Life as a Boy

A Brooklyn Memoir: My Life as a Boy

by Robert Rosen

Paperback(New Edition)

$17.95 
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Overview

A darkly comic and deeply moving story of a New York City lost to time.

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 rough-and-tumble working-class neighborhood. Though only a 20-minute and 15-cent subway ride from the gleaming towers of Manhattan across the East River, Flatbush remained insular and provincial—a place where Auschwitz survivors and WWII 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 and 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.

From the bestselling author of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

Formerly published under the title Bobby in Naziland.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781909394988
Publisher: Oil on Water Press
Publication date: 07/07/2022
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Robert Rosen is the author of the international bestseller Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon and the investigative memoir Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography. His work has appeared in Mother Jones, The Soho Weekly News, The Independent, Uncut, and Proceso. Born in Brooklyn, he attended Erasmus Hall High School and the City College of New York, where he studied writing with Joseph Heller and Francine du Plessix Gray. Over the course of his career, he’s edited erotic magazines, written speeches for the Secretary of the Air Force, and been awarded a Hugo Boss poetry prize.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
The Goyim and the Jews

First of all, I didn't call them goyim. My parents and grandparents called them goyim. I knew what the word meant; I knew hundreds of Yiddish words, maybe a thousand. I just never used them because they sounded too… Jewish. Yiddish was the language old Jews spoke when they didn't want young Jews to understand what they were saying. So I didn't call the goyim anything, even though our building was full of them.
Mostly they were Catholics, like the Coogans, who lived on the first floor. At first there were five Coogans: James Sr., Mary, Stephanie, James Jr., and Christopher. Then when I was five, Gary was born, and soon after that, Mary, whom my mother called “the shikse,” was pregnant again. It began to seem as if she were popping out a new kid as often as their dog, Queenie, was popping out a litter, which was just about every year.
“Why does Mary have so many babies?” I asked my mother, who had only me.
“Because they're Catholic,” she said, which, as far as she was concerned, explained everything I needed to know about Catholics in general and the Coogans in particular—like why they hung over every bed in their apartment a bloody, agonized Jesus on a cross that horrified me every time I went to visit them and eat their goyim food slathered in goyim condiments; or why James Jr., Stephanie, and Christopher went to Holy Innocents, rather than PS 249, where they learned that the Jews killed Christ (though they didn't seem to hold me personally responsible); or why Mary washed out James Jr.'s and Christopher's mouths with soap every time they took the Lord's name in vain, a punishment my mother held over my head like the Sword of Damocles, should she ever hear a “dirty word” spout from my lips. But she never inflicted this cruelty upon me, not because she never heard me say “fuck” or “shit,” and not even after our next-door neighbor Mrs. McAllister told her that I was standing in front of the house shouting “Fuck!” at the top of my lungs. She never did it because that was physical child abuse, and enlightened Jews trafficked only in the emotional kind.
And though my mother never stopped me from hanging around with the Coogans, or any other goyim, for that matter, she preferred I spend my time in the company of Jews—except for Jeffrey Abromovitz, who lived in the building next door. My mother must have known that Abromovitz, though he possessed only a vague awareness of what a vagina was, had taken it upon himself ...

Table of Contents

1 The Goyim and the Jews 1

2 Naziland 19

3 Heil Irwin! 25

4 Tales of Eichmann 33

5 Reading for Pleasure 43

6 Magical Thinking 50

7 Speak, Memory 58

8 Midsummer 1952 68

9 The Great Candy-Store Tragedy 73

10 Carefully Taught 89

11 Fragments of My Father 99

12 Maris in the Fall 108

13 Cruel Affections 123

14 In America 128

15 The Flatbush Diet 133

16 Modern Art 140

17 A World of Grudge 144

18 Something Different Happened 151

19 A Head Full of Holocaust 168

20 Far from Flapbush-An Epilogue 174

Afterword Personal Nazis 178

About the Author 183

Acknowledgments 184

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