His entry begins:
I am currently reading a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ray Monk. I intend to write a story about Wittgenstein, who served as a porter at Guy’s Hospital during World War II. This was his war service. My narrator, a young American caught in London during the Blitz, befriends Wittgenstein and the story is about their curious friendship.About Ravage & Son, from the publisher:
Wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century. He was also a Jewish homosexual who converted to Catholicism. He came from the richest family in Vienna and...[read on]
A master storyteller’s novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century ManhattanVisit Jerome Charyn's website.
Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror.
Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage,an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish “Mr. Hyde,” a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.
A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.
The Page 69 Test: Under the Eye of God.
My Book, The Movie: Big Red.
Q&A with Jerome Charyn.
The Page 69 Test: Ravage & Son.
Writers Read: Jerome Charyn.
--Marshal Zeringue
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