Bobby in Naziland

A darkly comic and deeply moving memoir of a New York City lost to time, from the author of the bestselling John Lennon bio Nowhere Man


From the final days of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-1950s to the arrival of the Beatles in 1964, Bobby in Naziland is an unsentimental journey through one Brooklyn neighborhood. Though only a 20-minute and 15-cent subway ride from the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Flatbush remained provincial and working-class―a place where Auschwitz survivors and W. W. II 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.


Filled with echoes of the current moment, Bobby in Naziland also vividly depicts the racism that Donald Trump—who grew up just a few miles from Flatbush, in Queens—knew intimately and exploited to win the presidency.