Ravage & Son

May 8, 2023
The underwhelming latest from Charyn (Big Red) portrays real-life newspaper editor Abraham Cahan battling with a fictional real estate baron in pre-WWI New York City. Cahan, the muckraking editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, finds himself at odds with Lionel Ravage, whose wealth and power provide mixed blessings for the city’s immigrant community; though he funds charities and helps people make their way through Ellis Island, he’s an uncompromising landlord. Years earlier, Cahan adopted one of Ravage’s numerous illegitimate children, Ben, after finding the boy laboring in a machine shop, and sent him to study law at Harvard. Now working as an investigator for the Kehilla, a group of wealthy Jews who police the city’s Jewish neighborhoods, Ben is on the trail of a madman assaulting Jewish girls. His investigation alternates with Cahan’s efforts to expose Ravage’s abuses and weaken his grip on the city, even as the newspaperman struggles with his own conscience for running ads from big businesses whose rapacious values differ from his own. Though Charyn continues to deliver boisterous and flavorful prose, the dueling plotlines detract from each other, and the detective sections build toward an unsatisfying reveal. This doesn’t quite do justice to the rich history it portrays.

August 1, 2023
A bleak tale of murder, corruption, and antisemitism in pre-World War I Manhattan. Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights has nothing on Charyn's Lower East Side, described by one character as home to "every kind of vermin." Abraham Cahan, muckraking editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, has no shortage of targets, including all-powerful real estate baron Lionel Ravage, "the fallen angel among Jewish aristocrats," who mistreats and abuses immigrants in equal measure. Having spawned countless illegitimate children, Ravage has little to do with any of them, including his conflicted son Ben, whom Cahan takes under his wing and gets into Harvard Law School. Shrugging off his law degree, Ben becomes an investigator for the Kehilla, a neighborhood watch-type group funded by wealthy Jews. Their aim is to stop rampant assaults on young Jewish women, one of whom is pulled out of the East River "like a broken mermaid." Ben will stop at nothing to find the culprit, including getting the stuffing kicked out of him. Painful revelations await. Stuffed, � la Ragtime, with real-life celebrities including Henry James (whose "sympathies didn't extend to the Jewish quarter" on Ellis Island), the novel doesn't aways justify their presence. There are enjoyable touches of magic realism, including an enforcer whose threatening presence is announced by canaries flitting around his too-small derby, but descriptions and digressions can make for slow reading. A bold effort, but following Charyn's brilliant Sergeant Salinger (2021) and enjoyable Big Red (2022), a disappointment. One of Charyn's less-rewarding forays into historical fiction.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.