Customer Reviews

The Dark Lady from Belorusse: A Memoir

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I loved this little book. I'm now reading the sequal, The Black Swan. I picked them up because they take place in the Bronx, where I grew up, and Charyn is close to my age. I frequented some of the places he did, but we had wildly different experiences. He is obsessed with his beautiful mother as were so many men she knew. He was extraordinary too. Reads a little like Doctorow only this is a memoir not a fantasy--or is it?

Little Charyn goes from about five years old to seven years old in this book. How he remembers everything so vividly (or is making most of it up} I don't know. But it's great story telling. At about 100 pages a book,though, Charyn seems to be stretching out his stories in order to extract as much money per page as he can. I'm reading library copies.

Jerome Charyn's "Dark Lady From Belorusse" is an entertaining little book, however it is practically impossible to believe that even a quarter of the events depicted in this "memoir" are true. Charyn would have us believe that he grasped situations at the age of five that wouldn't be well handled by a 50-year-old. I took the stories he tells about his mother, her interaction with local Bronx gangsters, and his dysfunctional family with a grain of salt. While some of these events may have taken place, there is no way they occurred as the author remembers them in this book. The author's fanciful embellishments can be a little annoying - what exactly does he take his readers for? - especially since he is attempting to pass the book off as a work of nonfiction. Charyn does better by his readers in his sequel to the "Dark Lady" entitled "The Black Swan," where he admits in an endnote that many of the events and characters depicted are fictional.

Disappointment over blatant fabrication aside, Charyn is a very creative writer with a vivid imagination that makes for interesting reading. His writing style can be a bit disjointed, and he sometimes clouds his descriptions with confusing, non-essential fodder that strays from the main idea. Charyn's anecdotes are entertaining if not believable, and the characters are vivid and fun to read about (although you'd probably not want to actually meet these people!). If poor little Charyn's mother and father are anything in life as they are in the book, the kid should be given a medal for survival. The portrayals are fascinating, and one would hope that there aren't too many parents out there like the one "Baby" has to endure.

"The Dark Lady..." is only about 100 pages long - you can read it in no time. If you have an afternoon to spare and don't mind the author's inability to discern fact from fiction, give it a read