Listen Ruben Fontanez

Neugeboren's second novel is the story of Harry Meyers--New York schoolteacher, alienated Jew, aging widower resigned to lonely retirement--and of what happens to him when his uneasy peace is shattered by violence.

It is a taut, powerful story, quick with suspense, and original in approach. Neugeboren captures the brutality, the comic madness, the very texture of existence seething with the West Side's rooming-house ghetto.