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Coney Island, 1939: On the eve of World War II, fifteen-year-old Harry Catzker spends his after-school hours on his bike, picking up betting slips from Coney Island carnival freaks for the local bookie and racing his imaginary sworn enemy, German Captain Ziegenbaum, whose ship menaces the coastline. His parents are in their own world: his father writes a serial novel for the local Yiddish newspaper by day and hangs out with other intellectuals at the Cafe Royal by night; his beautiful mother grows increasingly bitter, yearning for a glamorous life that is certain to be denied to the wife of a writer. As the lights of the Cyclone and Luna Park glow in the Coney Island night, Harry finds a surrogate family in the freaks and low-lifes. A premature victim of Weltschmerz, lovingly applied by loved ones, ignorant of its toxicity on the young, Harry ponders life, art, and philosophy, and politics with Aba, a Yiddish poet who boards with his family, yet he is unable to shake the dark foreboding of a disaster that finally materializes, changing his life utterly.
Coney, soaked through with atmosphere and guided by an uncommon comic touch, captures the essence of a young man s coming of age in an extraordinary place and time. Depicting Coney Island in all its garish and gritty human spectacle, Amram Ducovny s dark and brilliant first novel suggests the stark intensity of a Weegee photograph, the heart of E. L. Doctorow s Ragtime, and the soul of an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel.
Coney Island, 1939, is the setting of this atmospheric novel that depicts the legendary amusement park as an ungracefully aging beauty, full of carnival freaks, gangsters and displaced Jewish families. At its center is fifteen-year-old Harry Catzker, who finds himself unwelcome at home by his father, a Freud-obsessed serial fiction writer for the local Yiddish paper, and a mother whose desire for glamour leads to tragedy. Harry takes a job collecting betting slips for a sleazy dwarf named Woody and along the way befriends, among others, a five-hundred pound woman and a dog-faced boy. The young and imaginative Catzker enjoys philosophical dialogues with Aba, a Yiddish poet who boards with the family. Eventually Aba is blackmailed by local mobsters who urge him to commit arson. Fire is a common occurrence at Coney Island, but this one figuratively engulfs every character, changing each life irrevocably. Ducovny, father of actor David Duchovny, has many nonfiction credits to his name; his colorful debut novel, however, owes some credit to both E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs.
Rebecca Rego
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