The stirring novel of a boy’s poignant coming of age during the 1920s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side

When Benny Kramer’s father came to the United States, he was hungry, broke, and ignorant. Handed a banana and told it was “American food,” he scarfed it down, peel and all. By the time he died, he was no richer, but much wiser, and everything he learned he imparted to his son. Growing up on New York’s Lower East Side between the wars, Benny’s life was just as chaotic as his neighborhood.

How many young boys have seen a man decapitated by a horse? How many know blacksmiths who got tangled up in a multiple homicide? How many win an elocution contest, only to find out it was rigged by the mob? For Benny, these are everyday events, and he remembers them with the biting wit that made Jerome Weidman one of the most beloved novelists of his day.