A Brooklyn Memoir: My Life as a Boy

By Robert Rosen

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 190939498X
• ISBN13: 9781909394988
• Release Date: July 2022
• Publisher: Oil on Water Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"