Customer Reviews

Brownsville

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Spanning the mid-1920s to mid-1940s, this tale of a young Jewish boy's attraction to New York's Jewish mafia runs a fairly familiar course without adding much to the genre. Starting in the Catskills, the story moves through the well-traveled streets of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, as Allie Tannenbaum is drawn into the gangster life. The story is effective at showing how the Jewish gangsters, collectively famous under the name "Murder, Inc." , offered a seductively empowering alternative to victimhood for young Jewish kids. Unfortunately, the story quickly gets bogged down in the convoluted turf wars between the various branches of Jewish mobsters. Loyalties lurch this way and that, and Kleid struggles to depict these twists and turns -- which grow especially complex once the cops start to shut everyone down -- within the limited framework of the graphic form. The writing isn't helped by the artwork, which, while very strong when portraying architecture and interiors, utterly fails when it comes to faces, as the various characters blend together. Ultimately, it's hard to recommend this book when there are so many better non-graphic ones covering the same subject matter (all listed in a nice bibliography at the back), such as Rich Cohen's Tough Jews, and E.L. Doctorow's novel Billy Bathgate -- plus all the films depicting that time and place.

Set in the 1930s in Brooklyn is a graphic novel featuring something different: the story of Jewish gangsters, run by an organized mob. Author Neil Kleid has always been interested in organized crime, but he wished his graphic novel to be set in the history of the Mafia. His research led to the insights on the Jewish Mob - and here result in a realistic story of life in a bygone era.

Diane C. Donovan, Editor
California Bookwatch