|
Amazon
Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: Authorhouse
ISBN-10: 1585007749
Type: Fiction
Pages: 280
Copyright: Feb. 9, 2000
ISBN-13: 9781585007745
Land of Dreams is a coming-of-age novel about a ten-year-old boy in 1938-1939, the year America was struggling out of the Depression and Europe was staggering into war. Al, the adult narrator, relives that fateful year. He is witness to the struggles of his immigrant family: his father risks his life to oust the gangsters from the painters union; his mother tries to smuggle her sister's family out of Soviet Russia. Al resonates to his grandfather's Orthodoxy and is challenged by his older brother's scientism. He has other conflicts as well: being accepted by his Irish-American fourth grade teacher, dealing with the class bully who dislikes him because he's fat and Jewish, escaping his over-protective mother and trying to make sense of his family and the world. While he daydreams about Native Americans in nearby Crotona Park, he meets an African-American classmate whose grandfather is an Apache survivor of his tribe's 1890 Florida imprisonment.
Besides the serious themes, we witness the mishaps at the Christmas and Chanukah plays and the Bronx Bombers winning the 1938 World Series. In his struggles, Al enlists the help of the 1930's comic strip and radio heroes (e.g., Superman, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers), as well as Biblical characters (e.g., Noah, Abraham, Moses and God) to confront formidable enemies: the school bully, the immigration police, Adolph Hitler, Death and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Comments from editors include, "evocative...interesting, admirable," "the author captured the protagonist's point of view with sensitivity and warmth," "a warm, lively picture of family life."
Excerpt
Prologue
The falling snowflakes speckled the field, gently blanching the earth's grays and browns. I barely felt the cold as I stared at the double tombstone under which my parents lay. At least they had a known resting place, not like my brother Morris, who had wandered far from home. Beyond them stretched an endless field of tombstones. At first I saw them as solemn markers, then as the finger-tips of their occupants trying to claw their way out . Finally they were accusing fingers pointing heavenwards, wanting justice for their earthly days. No living person was within sight, but the buzzing traffic on the nearby expressway was a reminder of the world outside. As I stood there, the landscape slowly transformed itself into images of my parents, not the time-worn persons they had become, but the spirited couple of my childhood. I found myself staring into memories that flashed across the screen of my mind like unedited film clips, until the scenes slowed down to September of 1938.
Death, the Great Depression, Trade Unions, Gangsters, War, and Pogroms were abstractions; I lived in the moment-to-moment details of my child's life. I heard but barely understood my parents, who had survived pogroms and revolution in Russia to escape to their Land of Dreams. Their initial struggles were rewarded in the prosperity of the '20's, but the Great Depression wiped out those gains. They suffered with millions of others, but they survived with Poppa's working and Momma's frugality. I did not know the dangers we faced that year: the gangsters that Poppa challenged in the painters union, the naturalization investigators who could discover Poppa's falsified birth date and his participation in the Russian Revolution. Momma was always worried, if not about us, her family in Russia. I played detective to uncover family secrets that I would not, even under torture, reveal. I had the murkiest impression of a world tottering on the brink of destruction yet keenly felt the triumphs and disappointments of my small, yet all-encompassing universe. I faced a class bully, a stern Irish-American teacher, a pretty Hebrew teacher and an authoritarian rabbi. I had as allies a brother who was often my savior and sometimes my nemesis, a pious grandfather, an overprotective mother and a father who tried to toughen me for an unjust world. I also enlisted the help of Superman, Buck Rogers, Jack Armstrong, Dick Tracy, Moses, Abraham and God. I was convinced of our inevitable triumph-- weren't the Good Guys supposed to win? They did in the radio serials and comics. Sickness was a temporary aberration curable by the presence and medications of Dr. Astrakhan. Death was nebulous and the sun was supposed to shine for family outings. I did not yet know that the laws of the universe were transience, capriciousness and chaos. The vortex of my existence was the intersection of Fulton Avenue and 174th Street in the Bronx, bordered by Public School # 4, Crotona Park and the Bathgate Avenue market. Beyond those boundaries lay a world I was beginning to discover. As the cold snowflakes dissolved on my cheeks, merging with my tears, I was snugly in bed...
|
