Coney [Hardcover]

Amram Ducovny (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2000

Aging Into the 21st Century draws on developmental theory and gerontological research to provide a framework for the creation of "value-friendly" long-term care settings and for psychotherapy with the elderly.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At 72, Ducovny (author of 10 nonfiction books, including David Ben Gurion; playwright; journalist; and father of X-Files star David) debuts as a novelist with a coming-of-age memoir set in the seedy underworld of Coney Island in the late 1930s. Fifteen-year-old Harry Catzker learns to think about life through Brooklyn-accented, imaginative Platonic dialogues with his family's Polish boarder, Yiddish poet Aba Stolz. The teenager also becomes familiar with life's seamier pursuits riding his bike along Coney Island's tawdry midway, befriending the local sideshow freaks and observing the dog pack that patrols the boardwalk. A midget named Woody, owner of a bike rental and repair shop, introduces Harry to Luna Park's illegal trades. Woody starts Harry off as a small-time bagman, but soon involves him in the biggest arson scam in Coney Island history. The pervasive atmosphere of sleaze and fraud also draws in Harry's father, Moishe, a Yiddish journalist whose serialized novels engage a loyal audience of Orthodox Jews, and Harry's mother, Velia, a Polish refugee with secrets of her own. Even the intellectual Aba falls victim to blackmail and worse. Ducovny captures the range of New York immigrant experiences: Aba's trips to Harlem jazz clubs contrasts with the stubborn ethnicity of Harry's grandmother, Bama, who came to America in 1919, never learned English, and returns to the old country a widow on the eve of WWII. Characters like the wheelchair-bound crime boss Vic Menter, cruising in his 1939 black chauffeur-driven Packard, counterpoint nostalgic scenes of Aba, recalling the crime he committed in Poland or giving a poetry reading. Most of all, however, there's the specter of the European genocide taking place at the same time as these Coney Island adventures, shedding a somber shadow on this colorful, compassionate story. Agent, Andrew Blauner. 30,000 first printing.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this first novel, Ducovny (educator, father of actor David Duchovny, and author of ten books of nonfiction) portrays three groups living in 1930s Coney Island: immigrant Polish Jews fleeing persecution, gangsters, and carnival sideshow attractions. Teenager Harry Catzker runs errands for the thugs and finds a surrogate mother in Fifi, the carnival's fat woman. The horror of events unfolding in Europe informs the lives of Harry's parents, Moses and Velia, and their friend, Yiddish poet Aba Stolz. A secret from Aba's Polish past leads to the tragic deaths of the three adults. While the fears and dreams of the Jews are movingly portrayed, Ducovny keeps too many story lines moving simultaneously (Aba's love for an African American singer, the gangsters' arson scheme, Velia's adultery, and the histories of the various "freaks"). A scene of the carnival workers having group sex while Harry watches may be intended to show the humanity of the characters but comes off as merely gratuitous. Recommended for large fiction collections and where there is interest in Jewish or New York City history.DJudith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover; 1st edition (September 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585670677
• ISBN-13: 978-1585670673
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,331,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking and original, March 13, 2001

By 

Lynn Adler - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coney (Hardcover)

Young Harry Catzker is coming of age in a topsy turvy world, which starts when he falls off his bike and smashes it to pieces, setting in motion a series of other events, but that is the least of his worries. Coney has been described (see flyleaf) as a dark comic novel and that is what it is. I had perhaps unfairly expected a little "schmaltz", but Ducovney doesn't give an inch in that department, except perhaps at the Café Royal. Harry's mother keeps repeating to her husband "always with the jokes." She finds terror underneath the joking. The reader is on her wavelength. Harry will suffer in this world, but he will turn out all right. He seems to have an instinct for survival. By the time the novel finishes, however, no one else will be spared.

Set in 1939 in Coney Island, New York, the story presages and parallels the coming Holocaust. As Harry's father (serial novelist for a Yiddish newspaper) tells Harry, in Poland there is no freedom and the law is on the side of the "Pogromchiks", in America the law is on your side, but you may not be able to exercise it. The three main adults are all immigrants, and as it becomes clearer and clearer, they are not safe in America either. Aba, poet and family boarder, wonders how many Jewish lives will have to be given before there can be a State of Israel. Unfortunately, he is eerily prescient. The reader desperately wants justice or a happy solution and the lesson is that there is none.

This gritty book assaults the senses. It is difficult and at times even disgusting to read some of the passages, page after page of grime and cruelty, tempered occasionally by kindness - the love of his father, Aba's life lessons, and by visits to Fifi, the fat lady. From the opening chapter where a pack of dogs are tearing each other apart, the reader is in for a dizzying descent into hell. There are gangsters, circus freaks, and adults whose lives are confused, in tatters and beyond their control. At first it looks like a good guys versus the bad guys and an attempt to shock. Even the landscape is bleak, the glory days of Coney Island when it had Luna Park and Dreamland, is past, and most of the novel takes place in the off season when the summer people have gone. Yet, as the novel builds momentum, the parallels to Hitler's rising power in Europe inform the book more and more and give it coherence.

Often the language is awkward and convoluted. Harry, his father, Aba, and his mother go into reveries and fantasies in ways which confuse the reader, although the concept is good. Moise, the father, speaks out loud to Freud and then turns and speaks to real people, for example. However, there is a lot of good imagery. Coney will get under your skin much as the particles of sand under the boardwalk and provoke you into confronting the biggest issues of our existence.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An engaging main character in a familiar story., September 2, 2000

By 

Lynn Suders (Flower Mound, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coney (Hardcover)

While much of the drama was obvious, typical of many other books dealing with the Jewish experience in America, the inner life of the main character most certainly was not. I enjoyed being inside Harry Catzkers head. His honesty and imagination make him highly sympathetic and his conversations with Aba in the cherry tree are utterly profound. This book reminded me very much of the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Chaim Potok. I felt so comfortable in this world that i was sorry when it had to end.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Mundane "Coney" is tepid, dense and ultimately superficial, May 5, 2001

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coney (Hardcover)

I had looked forward with great anticipation to Amram Ducovny's debut novel, "Coney." The novel, which examines both Jewish immigrant life and the culture of midway freaks of Coney Island life in the days immediately before World War II, sadly wasa major disappointment. Overpopulated with stock characters, laden with "atmosphere" which tinly substitutes for a paucity of genuine insight, and caricaturing Jewish immigrant life instead of shedding light on its weaknesses and inconsistencies, the novel lacks the literary consistency and moral strength of Kevin Baker's "Dreamland," a work which treats many of the same themes Ducovny's work does not come close to presenting.

The numerous characters which flood the pages of "Coney" never have a chance to develop themselves. Even the most sympathetic of them, the tormented boarder-poet Aba and the drastically overweight Queen Fifi, always seem on the verge of becoming authentic characters, but Ducovny never permits them the time or consequence in the narrative to evolve. The central character, the youthful Harry Catzker, bounces between being a wise, nearly dispassionate observer and a sympathetic, frustrated teen-ager shackled by his immigrant parents and stunted by the poverty-induced decadence of Coney Island life in 1930s Brooklyn.

"Coney" is not without merit, and Ducovny certainly has a wonderful ear for dialogue. His insertion of periodic conversations between Harry (Hershele) and Aba ring with symbolic and literal truth. These brief "Cherry Tree" interludes are, to me, the best part of the novel. Ducovny also excels in revealing the tension between immigrant parents and their children; his portrait of the friction between Harry's embittered mother and his repressive maternal grandmother crackle with genuine anger and betrayal.

However, the novel never escapes its tendency towards romanticizing, even stereotyping, its characters. His compassionate portraits of the profound misery felt by Coney's sideshow freaks seem both predictable and staged; each "misfit" seems to possess a nobility born of underserved suffering. This "heart-of-gold" touch wears thin quickly. The nefarious gangsters have all the believability of bad guys from 1930s B movies. Even Ducovny's foreshadowing of of the horrors of the Holocaust seem to be literary cliches rather than engendering fear of the ominous signs of genocidal catastrophy.

Despite its good intentions, "Coney" never escapes its flaws. Readers who desire insight into Jewish-immigrant life in New York, the depressing life of side-show freaks or commentary on the seemingly endless nastiness of life in general would be better served by reading more competent treatments.