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.

Author: Robert Rosen
Publisher: Oil on Water Press
Published: 07/07/2022
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.46lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.49d
ISBN: 9781909394988

About the Author
Rosen, Robert: - 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.