Robert Rosen

It's been a while since I've posted about A Brooklyn Memoir, my tale of growing up in Flatbush at a time when the beloved Dodgers abandoned the borough for Los Angeles, WWII was still fresh in everybody's mind, and the military veterans and Holocaust survivors who populated the neighborhood suffered from what was not yet known as PTSD. But a podcast about the book that I recorded nine months ago recently popped up. You can listen to it on the above player.

Yvonne Battle-Felton, the host of Bookable Space, is a writer and academic based in the UK. Her probing questions about A Brooklyn Memoir got me talking about the racism, hatred, and emotional and physical violence that I tried to forget after I left Flatbush in the mid-1970s. It wasn't until 2012 that I decided to write about those long-ago days; I then spent the next several years recalling fragment by fragment what I'd so successfully put out of my mind.

I also read three short excerpts from the book: the beginning of Chapter 1, "The Goyim and the Jews"; the beginning of Chapter 3, "Heil Irwin," which is about my father; and the section from Chapter 9, "The Great Candy-Store Tragedy," that gets into the Brooklyn Dodgers and Bobby Thomson's devastating "shot heard 'round the world."

Tune in and return to a New York City that's been lost to time.

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Please join me for a discussion of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon: Wednesday, October 4, 6 p.m. at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

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