The Prince of West End Avenue

Comedy and tragedy are combined in The Prince of West End Avenue as Otto Korner, the narrator, directs his quirky, libidinous fellow residents of a retirement home in a production of Hamlet, all the while recalling his life's adventures spanning the 20th century in Europe and then America.

Korner is a Holocaust survivor, and the arrival of a luscious new employee who bears a shocking resemblance to a woman he had loved in his youth throws him back into the past. The narrator weaves together past and present, with events cresting at the performance of Hamlet.

Though the machinations of the Emma Lazarus retirement home's Dickensian residents are always in the novel's foreground, the character and history of the narrator, Hamlet-like himself, are gradually revealed as the story's integral backdrop.

His flashbacks include his precocious beginnings as a would-be poet, his bungled encounters with the incipient Dada movement and with Lenin in World War I Zurich, his first marriage and his life in Weimar Germany during the rise of Hitler, his experience of the Holocaust, and his immigration to the United States and second marriage.

Little by little, and with increasing urgency, he is forced to confront truths about himself that he had thought safely buried. These unwelcome memories are interspersed (and overlap) with the current doings at the retirement home, the hilarious rivalries, factions, jockeying for position, and passionate love affairs of the residents.

The novel ends on the night of the first public performance of the Emma Lazarus Old Vic's production of Hamlet, shortly after the last of Otto Korner's secrets is wrung from him. His is a story of life's chaos, complexity, richness - and moral dilemmas. It is a story of how our human qualities - pride, envy, timidity - can sometimes lead us to unintentionally hurt or even destroy those we love.