Marilyn the Wild - Jerome Charyn

 Marilyn the Wild is the first of the Isaac Quartet but was the second to be written.   Marilyn is the daughter of the colossus that is Isaac Sidel, Chief Inspector of the NYPD and undisputed king of the East Side.   Marilyn, as the title suggests, is a little wild.  She has just abandoned her third husband and is now shacked up with Manfred 'Blue Eyes' Coen, who happens to be Isaac's fool, the arch amid Isaac's Angels.

Isaac was once one of a trio of young High School chess prodigies.   Now all three men are in their forties, separated or divorced, and each plagued with a single more or less grown child.   Mordecai's daughter Honey is on the streets, pimped by black dudes.   Philip's teenage son Rupert has run away with an exotic Sephardic girl.

Isaac is off to Paris for an international cop conference.  Whilst there he tracks down his long-absent faher Joel, who ran off to be an artist and now lives happily in the Jewish quarter with his Vietnamese girlfriend.   Isaac's family is a constant source of stress.   His brother Leo is in the civil lock-up for unpaid alimony.   Their mother Sophie keeps a junk shop on Essex Street.   While Isaac is in Paris, he gets a call: Sophie has been attacked in her shop and is in a coma.

Isaac descends on the Easr Side like a typhoon.   He quickly establishes that a bizarre teenage gang ('lollipops) is responsible for the attack and a bunch of seemingly random, not to say pointless, petty crimes.   The gang consists of a very young male, a slightly older female, and a stocky oriental guy.   What is more, Isaac comes to realise that their crime wave is somehow focused on him personally.

It's a crime novel.   It reflects the Seventies in which it was written.   But Marilyn the Wild is much more than that.   It is a deep dive into the world of Jews in mid-century New York.   The NYPD is either Jewish or Irish (Isaac's estranged wife Kathleen is Irish, thus Marilyn's wildness is deemed inevitable), but Isaac is very aware of black and hispanic inroads being made into his domain - two of the most memorable characters are the Peruvian brothers Jorge and Zorro.   The world Charyn conjures is a racial kaliedoscope, albeit anchored in the Jewish world which is both his and Isaac's point of origin.   The prose fizzes, the dialogue zings.   The story romps along but it is the characters who stay with the reader.

I am hugely impressed.   So glad I bought the collected quartet from 1984.

Cesare - Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is 85 years old and has been publishing novels for more fifty years.  So why am I only just hearing about him?  Why has he been so disgracefully underpublished in the UK?

Congrats to Oldcastle/No Exit for getting hold of Charyn's 2020 novel Cesare.  They have published and publicised it well.   Cesare is the teenaged naval cadet Erik Holdermann who rescues a man being attacked by hooligans - only to learn that the man is Admiral Canaris, Head of the Abwehr.  Canaris is a man of honour who repays his obligations, and Erik becomes 'Cesare' to Canaris's Caligari (referencing the expressionist silent movie, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), assassinating his master's enemies.

Erik is Aryan but was brought up by prostitutes in the Berlin ghetto and educated at a Jewish school.   He is adopted by the wealthy Baron von Hecht and becomes besotted with the baron's half-Jewish daughter Lisalein.  By the time war breaks out Lisalein has married the Nazi Valentiner, formerly her father's accountant.  She and Erik smuggle Jews out of Berlin.   Ultimately, inevitably, the Gestapo catch up with them both.

They are reunited at Theresienstadt, the concentration camp 'paradise' which the Nazis created to mask the Holocaust.  Also here is Benhard Beck, the Jewish cabaret artist who was the orinal Mack the Knife in Brecht's Threepenny Opera.  He colludes with the commandant in maintaining the myth of the camp - until the Red Cross finally turn up to inspect it.

Cesare is an astonishing book.  It is violent, comic, and makes no bones about the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.  The fictional characters are as convincing as the 'real' people.  Erik, Lisalein and Beck are benificent monsters; Canaris, who was executed by the Nazis a month or so before their defeat, is a martyr.  I hope Cesare opens the floodgate for mass publication of Charyn's backlist.  Meanwhile I have tracked down an ominibus of his Isaac Sidel novels from the mid-Seventies.