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.

 

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Nowhere Man and Beaver Street are both dedicated to my wife and editor, Mary Lyn Maiscott, whom I call the Mistress of Syntax. She's also a singer-songwriter. This is a lyric video of her Christmas song, "Blue Lights," that she released in 2007. It's about her parents' World War II romance and features photos of them from that era. The song begins: "He was 25, she was just 23..."

 

The video was created by Christine Haire in celebration of the 15th anniversary of Mary Lyn's album, Blue Lights.

 

You can hear more of her music at marylynmaiscott.com.

 

Happy holidays to all!

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

This is the kind of document I wish I had when I was writing A Brooklyn Memoir. It's my father's pay record from 1944 and 1945, the final years of World War II, when the 94th Infantry Division had arrived in Nazi Germany as the Third Reich was making its last desperate stand against the advancing and soon to be victorious Allied armies.

 

The pay record contains many details that I was unfamilar with and that would have clarified the chronology of my father's war years, which he only discussed with me in the vaguest terms. I can see, for example, that when he was promoted from private first class (PFC) to corporal (CPL), on September 29, 1945, his salary skyrocketed from $15 per month to $40 per month; that a $6.50 life insurance premium was deducted every month; and that his life was valued at $10,000.

 

Had I known any of this, I'm sure I'd have included it in the book, as it adds another dimension to what my father was going through. Should there be a second edition of A Brooklyn Memoir, I will include it.

 

In the meantime, I offer his pay record as a souvenir of a time when Nazis were America's mortal enemy rather than domestic terrorists who declare themselves patriots and defenders of freedom.

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A Brooklyn Memoir is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

World War II and its effect on my father, Irwin Rosen, is one of the main themes of A Brooklyn Memoir. He was an infantyman in General Patton's 94th Division. He marched through France, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and took part in the liberation of a Nazi slave-labor camp. Despite my persistent questions, he never talked about what he experienced in any detail. Everything I learned about what happened to him in the war I learned from somebody else, usually my mother.

 

As a child, I loved looking at my father's war souvenirs, which I describe in the book. Recently, I came across a war souvenir I'd never seen before: his "Special Orders for German-American Relations" (first page depicted above), signed by Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, in 1945.

 

His orders were exactly as follows:

 

1. To remember always that Germany, though conquered, is still a dangerous enemy nation.

2. Never to trust Germans, collectively or individually.

3. To defeat German efforts to poison my thoughts or influence my attitude.

4. To avoid acts of violence, except when required by military necessity.

5. To conduct myself at all times so as to command the respect of the German people for myself, for the United States, and for the Allied Cause.

6. Never to associate with Germans.

7. To be fair but firm with Germans.

 

This happened a long time ago. My father would have been 99 September 24. This is another fragment of his life.

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A Brooklyn Memoir is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.