BEFORE MY LIFE BEGAN

by Jay Neugeboren ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 1985

Contemporary male American novelists don't come much more earnest than Neugeboren (The Stolen Jew, Sam's Legacy)--and this may be his most fretful book yet. David Voloshin is ten when WW II ends. He lives in Flatbush in Brooklyn, but later on, a promising high-school basketball stardom won't pan out because colleges won't accept him, are scared off by the central identification of David's (and his family's) life: he's the nephew of Abe Litvinov, a well-known mobster. Uncle Abe provides work (as a numbers runner on Flatbush Avenue) for David's weak father; and David himself is picked to take up the reins of the mob when Abe retires (or is killed). David, marrying young and beginning a family, goes in with Abe but with open eyes; he's sure he'll be different, more sensitive, yet during a period of mob violence, when Abe is killed, David is kidnapped by the rival Fasolino gang and must resort to murder in order to escape. Years pass. David, to save his skin, has assumed a whole new name--Aaron Levin--and a new family, a barely reconcilable new personality: an ex-Freedom Rider, then a serious, humanistic Massachusetts house architect. But Aaron's past as David haunts--along with memories of his first family, wife and daughter. Neugeboren's David sections--Jewish gangsterism, Brooklyn mores of the 50s--are quite good, acerbic, and often moving. Everything, in fact, that the Aaron section isn't, which instead is riddled with pop-psych moilings (""What is the story of anyone's life? Do lives, as such, have stories? Apart from birth and death, so they have beginnings and ends?"") and sexual melodrama. As with, especially, The Stolen Jew, Neugeboren shows himself to be a wonderful writer of parts of a book. Wholeness evades him, however, replaced with thrummings of sincere intention. Interesting but gappy work.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1985

Categories: FICTION