Ravage & Son
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
A master storyteller’s novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century Manhattan
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The underwhelming latest from Charyn (Big Red) portrays real-life newspaper editor Abraham Cahan battling with a fictional real estate baron in pre-WWI New York City. Cahan, the muckraking editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, finds himself at odds with Lionel Ravage, whose wealth and power provide mixed blessings for the city's immigrant community; though he funds charities and helps people make their way through Ellis Island, he's an uncompromising landlord. Years earlier, Cahan adopted one of Ravage's numerous illegitimate children, Ben, after finding the boy laboring in a machine shop, and sent him to study law at Harvard. Now working as an investigator for the Kehilla, a group of wealthy Jews who police the city's Jewish neighborhoods, Ben is on the trail of a madman assaulting Jewish girls. His investigation alternates with Cahan's efforts to expose Ravage's abuses and weaken his grip on the city, even as the newspaperman struggles with his own conscience for running ads from big businesses whose rapacious values differ from his own. Though Charyn continues to deliver boisterous and flavorful prose, the dueling plotlines detract from each other, and the detective sections build toward an unsatisfying reveal. This doesn't quite do justice to the rich history it portrays.
