The Black Swan [Hardcover]

Jerome Charyn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2000

What does an 11 year-old boy do when his classmates call him "Dumbo" and his parents don't seem to know that he exists? His mother, the beautiful Faigele spends her days pushing her 2 year-old son Marvin around in a stroller and barely hears Jerome's clarinet playing. The answer for Jerome Charyn is to go to the local movie house and hide out for a few hours every day. At the movies, he can escape, not be himself for a little while. One day, while watching Samson and Delilah for the seventh time that week, he is suddenly grabbed from his seat, dragged down a flight of stairs and winds up being introduced to a whole new way of life by three "cellar rats," as Jerome likes to call them.

They make him a part of their group and he soon finds himself dressed in a Feuerman & Marx suit collecting money for Farouk, the local gangster. Many of the men remember his mother, The Dark Lady, from her days as dealer of their local poker game.

With his distinctive style, a deep and accurate feeling for time and place, and an uncanny ability to communicate the world as seen through the imagination of an unusual boy, Charyn has created another gem of a memoir, a worthy sequel to The Dark Lady from Belorusse.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Picking up where his much-praised memoir The Dark Lady from Belorusse left off, Jerome Charyn continues the story of his childhood adventures in the Bronx. The year is 1949, and 11-year-old "Baby" (the nickname survived the 1947 arrival of younger brother Marve) regularly skips school to sneak off to a local movie theater, the Luxor. He's informally adopted by the theater's three eccentric owners, Bronx natives and classmates at Harvard who dropped out to purchase the Luxor and share a nearby apartment. Two of them pine for their former high school teacher, the married (and alcoholic) Mrs. Green, while the third burns with unrequited passion for a handsome fireman. Next, Baby connects with a local gangster, who sends him out to collect protection money from the area's businesses, ostensibly as payment for cases of celery tonic. The extensive stretches of dialogue are as colorful as the characters, and if it all seems a little too picturesque to be believable, well, the "Note to the Reader" does admit that the people, places, and events depicted "are the product of imaginative recreation." Who cares? Charyn's roistering account brings to life postwar New York City with such vividness and gusto that if it isn't true, it ought to be. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

A phantasmagoric medium by definition, movies appeal to us because they are literal projections of our deepest fantasies and fears, according to film critic and novelist Charyn. In a sequel to his acclaimed memoir, The Dark Lady from Belorusse, the author transports us to his early teen years in the Bronx, when he first discovered his obsession with the movies while seeking refuge from his difficult home life. Charyn's narrative resists the tired convention in which a misunderstood teen finds salvation in a fantasy world; instead, his memories of his early fascination with film unfold as a surreal, funny, often deeply disturbing reverie. Playing hooky from school, Charyn would sneak into the local movie palace to watch Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature in Samson and Delilah until he met the theater's owners, three draft-evading, possibly gay gangsters who lived in the basement. Charyn regales us with stories about Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, problems with Charyn's probation officer at school, a gay fireman named Dan O'Brian and the Black Swan, "the most celebrated casino and country club in the Catskill mountains." As the narrator dreamily reenacts plots from 1940s films, these characters and places move in and out of his hallucinatory reminiscences, while Charyn delicately weaves together movies, memories and intensely personal myths to re-create the daring and dangerous realm of his childhood imagination from the vantage point of an adult. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (June 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312208774
• ISBN-13: 978-0312208776
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,601,885 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in the mean streets of the Bronx and have remained a city wolf, dividing my time between New York City and Paris.

I grew up reading comic books and watching movies; you can see their influences in my books. I started writing novels at the age of eleven; Amazon carries 40+ titles, fiction and non-fiction.

For the past fourteen years I taught film at the American University of Paris.

I love Emily Dickinson's poems and William Faulkner's novels. I also love Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," which has the feel of a novel. (I wrote a book about Tarantino, "Raised by Wolves," after the film's release.)

My novel "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson," published in 2010, inspired a community of more than 3500 Emily Dickinson Facebook fans dedicated to the poet's place in the 21st century.

"The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" is now available in paperback in a reading group edition with online reading guide.

My most recent book, "Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil," was released on March 8, 2011, part of the Yale University Press series on American Icons. More than 1000 fans are already registered on its Facebook page.

I invite you to join me on Facebook for "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson" or "Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil." Or visit my website: www.jeromecharyn.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bronx Archipelago, August 15, 2001

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Black Swan (Hardcover)

"The Black Swan", is the sequel to, "The Dark Lady From Belorusse". I have not read the first volume, however the sequel stands on its own as a great piece of writing. I certainly intend to go back to the first, but if the latter were the only volume at hand, I would not hesitate to recommend others begin with it as I did. The book is described as a memoir, however there is a note at the end that states that events while based on his experiences as a youth also, "are the product of imaginative recreation". The balance of the disclaimer either is meant to be amusing, or is an effort to keep the Author out of the Federal Witness Protection Program.

The setting is The Bronx a few years after World War II. Amongst the other colorful characters, this is the time of Meyer Lansky who influences more than one event in the book. There are a host of other lesser members of the crime world that deal with anything from gambling, to cornering the market on Celery Tonic.

The one venture outside the Bronx is to the Catskill Mountains home not only to the name of the book, The Black Swan, but is also the residence of The Dark Lady who deals cards to her various infamous admirers. Throughout all of this is great humor whether of the darker sort related to King Farouk and The Bataan March, or what is the cigarette of preference at a school for asthmatics in Arizona.

After the disclaimer in the rear, I don't know where the line separating fact from imaginative recreation resides. Were all of the book true it would be a remarkable story as well as hilarious, and if fiction, nothing is diminished from a reading perspective. Who knows, maybe the kid did have a probation officer he fell hard for who was Lana Turner's twin. Fact or fantasy, who cares, a great piece of writing.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A singular, poignant memoir, June 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Black Swan (Hardcover)

Charyn's prose defies category: though published as nonfiction, this memoir reads like some of his singular, post-modern detective fiction. Transports us back to the Bronx of yore, with a cast of characters that's unforgettable.