[Charyn’s] storytelling is off-the-chart wonderful.
— Jerusalem Post
Ravage & Son
Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror.
Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish “Mr. Hyde,” a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.
A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.
Foreword Reviews “Book of the Day” selection
Literary Hub “New Books!” selection
Book Marks “Best Reviewed Books of the Week” selection
Mysterious Bookshop Crime Club Pick
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781954276208
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781954276192
Listen to Jerome Charyn discuss his novel Ravage & Son on the Virtual Memories Show, New Books Network, Too Jewish Radio, and Leonard Lopate at Large.
Watch Jerome Charyn in conversation with Jay Neugeboren about Ravage & Son at The Mysterious Bookshop.
Discover the story behind Ravage & Son at the Jewish Book Council and through interviews with Jerome Charyn at PopMatters, Reader’s Entertainment Magazine, and Book Q&As.
Preview Ravage & Son in Evergreen Review and The Forward.
Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Ravage & Son; Sergeant Salinger; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy: A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Among other honors, his work has been longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and PEN Award for Biography, shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and selected as a finalist for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York.
visit author page »Praise for Ravage & Son
[A] gritty historical crime novel. . . . Brawny, vibrant pulp fiction.
— The Forward
A panorama of the times.
— The Reporter
Both social commentary and a whodunit . . . [Charyn] tells a story about social issues relevant today including LGBT shame, class struggle, immigration standards, antisemitism, and balanced journalism. His talent at blending history with fiction results in a magnificent portrait of the darker side of society.
Charyn is an institution. . . . His skill is such that it’s difficult to separate the real-world figures and entities from the characters and places the author is inventing.
— Washington Independent Review of Books
Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights has nothing on Charyn’s Lower East Side.
— Kirkus Reviews
Charyn continues to deliver boisterous and flavorful prose.
— Publishers Weekly
[Charyn’s] writing is devastatingly poignant and nearly impossible to categorize. He switches between ‘genres’ like another man might change his shirt. . . . [In Ravage & Son] the accomplished author has turned to his own past, living in New York City, to dredge up the sumptuous details surrounding what once was the world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, riddled with corruption and the ugliness of antisemitism.
— Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore (Spokane, WA)