Bobby In Naziland: A Tale of Flatbush

I received this book from a friend who knows the author. I found him to be a very talented writer, with a real gift for storytelling. I was drawn into the narrative immediately, and stayed involved and interested throughout. It was a great read. I just loaned it to a friend who’s a voracious reader, and plan to buy it for other friends who grew up in Brooklyn too.Although I’m a girl, a few years older than Mr. Rosen, and grew up in the Bronx, with different kinds of people for parents, I’m totally familiar with the kind of environment he describes, only the people with the numbers on their arms were not neighbors or casual strangers, but members of my extended family. My dad even had a cousin who ran a candy store in Far Rockaway, whom we occasionally visited. I have vivid memories of that small, dark, cramped space, the comics, the candy, and most of all, the egg creams.My parents both came here in the 1920s, at 21 and 16, and met when they both lived on Fox Street in The Bronx, at an informal gathering for Jewish singles that took place in an aunt's apt. every Friday night. While they were spared the Holocaust, the family members who remained behind were not. The Hungarian Jews were the last Jews to be taken, and quickly rounded up in a 24 hour period; many of them survived. A group from my dad’s family were in Auschwitz together, which helped them to survive. (The men were sent to labor camps). One group came to the States after liberation, in 1948, while others trickled in from Israel and Paris in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s. Some went to Israel and others to Canada and California.I'll never forget the stories, from those who could bear to talk about it. One surviving cousin cannot, so I spare her the questions I have, or she'll begin weeping, 75 years later. One aunt in particular, who was only 16 when the round-up came, told how her father was shot dead in front of the entire family because he would not leave his crippled, wheelchair-bound daughter behind as they were being marched to the waiting trains. An older sister, a pharmacist, was able to spirit in a vial of poison, so those with her always had the feeling that they could control their own destinies if things got too unbearable. Paradoxically, I always thought that that exit strategy, and their attachment and their love for each other, probably helped them stay alive.A talented seamstress, who later worked for coutourier designers, my aunt would tell of seeing the dress which she had made for her mother, on a fellow inmate, a sure sign of what her fate had been. She exchanged dresses with her so she could get it back and wear it herself. I have an email copy of the manuscript that another cousin had been working on for years, but can’t quite bring myself to read more than a few pages of it, because I know or have heard about many of the people mentioned.And like Mr. Rosen as a child, I too became obsessed with the subject, and read a great deal about it. I particularly remember the Life magazine story about the guards who made lampshades out of human skin, which he referred to. I can’t bear to read that stuff now because I don’t have the emotional distance that somehow I had as a kid.In any case, Mr. Rosen's deft narrative skills brought so much of this back to me. I highly recommend his book.

I love this book.Growing up and wrestling with issues of identity is hard enough without living in a cheap apartment in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood right after World War II, without being Jewish and being surrounded by anti-Semites when the holocaust was still fresh and horrifying, and as evident as the numbers tattooed on the arms of so many people in the streets of Bobby Rosen’s Flatbush neighborhood.There is the particular well-known resonance of Brooklyn egg creams and candy stores, but in this case, the candy store is owned and operated by the author’s father, an angry veteran of The Battle of the Bulge who hates pretty much everyone, but especially Blacks and Puerto Ricans. Lucky for them all, mom has enough emotional strength to lift everyone up while giving sonny boy a destructive/supportive Jewish mother treatment.But before you assume that the book is a depressing ride through a poor kid’s past, let me assure you it isn’t. It is darkly humorous—sometimes laugh out loud so—and filled with all sorts of delights from gustatory, to the uplifting power of music, to sports, movies, and amazing relatives who are characters come alive.I think of it as being in the realm of Brighton Beach Memoirs, but more inner-referenced, more emotional, and with characters who are more believable than Neil Simon’s. I love this book.

The U.S. was seemingly on top of the world after World War II. But the war and horrors of the Nazi regime lingered in neighborhoods like Flatbush, home to many holocaust survivors. Full disclosure: Bob wrote football and basketball stories when I was the sports editor of our high school newspaper. His third published book is crisply written and dauntingly candid about the less sentimental aspects of a Brooklyn childhood. It was also interesting to revisit streets and other Flatbush locations that I knew fairly well in my own childhood.

felt this book was a poignant peek into the world of a thoughtful boy living in a mostly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn during the 50s and 60s. With Holocaust survivors in the neighborhood, he was haunted by images of the Holocaust, then later by the Kennedy deaths. Bobby, with his WWII parents not equipped to deal with a child of such depth and complexity, had to struggle with these macabre images and thoughts on his own. The writing is fluid and poetic. I loved this book. It was hard to put down.

Having attended elementary and high school with Bobby Rosen, I can vouch for the accuracy of events and people he so poignantly captured in this very readable book.But more than a simple re-telling of our childhood stories, his analyses skillfully probe the culture and critical events of those times. You can feel the simmering of social change in the complex and often contradictory words and actions by the people in Bobby's universe.I strongly recommend this book for baby boomers and those who want insight into a vibrant urban experience in the dozen years after World War II.

I greatly enjoyed reading it. I related to it on a number of levels: also born in '52, I spent first 12 years of life on a deteriorating Coney Island block. Like the author, I too knew EVERY nook and cranny of my block and was fascinated by our copy of Shirer's Rise and Fall (probably on the same living-room shelf as Irving Stone) and watched every documentary to pop up, whether on Cronkite's "Twentieth Century" or concerning some war-related notable on the Mike Wallace-narrated "Biography," etc. This was a fast compulsive read and I highly recommend it.

Robert’s writing is intoxicating. You are immediately immersed in a time warp , where history and personal revelations intertwine. The story is tender, comical, sweet and accurately details a place in time , that is unforgettable. It is a real page turner. You don’t have to be a Brooklynite to enjoy this journey.