MEMOIR OF SPRING

A nostalgic book in which the homesick narrator- isolated in Hollywood -- looks back on boyhood days in Brooklyn. All who remember Sman and Sir with its delightful record of a combat of ideologies between a father and son- each deeply caring for the other but neither able to come to terms with his emotions, will welcome this portrait of a struggling Jewish family. The narrator would- he felt- be able to forget those incidents that colored his early life when dwelling on the crumbling Olympian heights of Hollywood. Instead they take on sharpened intensity. There's warm sense of humor and a touch of tragedy in each experience. The race between the horse that pulled the fruit wagon and the one that pulled the ice wagon is deliciously provocative of mirth and tears. His first boyhood romance with a beautiful Gentile who was way to out of place in the Catskill's View House has tenderness and poignancy. Again-there is the contest between the roosters. Story after story weaves into the whole fabric: the Sussman triangle, Uncle Ben's search for that something beyond, Aunt Minnie's aspirations for her man, etc. Elick Moll brings a quiet philosophical touch, tenderness and compassion, and always humor to what reads like personal memoirs.