Ravage  Son, Jerome Charyn
Ravage  Son, Jerome Charyn
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Ravage & Son

Author: Jerome Charyn

Narrator: Steven Jay Cohen

Unabridged: 9 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/22/2023


Synopsis

A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early twentieth-century Manhattan

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.

About Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. He has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He lives in New York.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nancy on June 23, 2023

I am perhaps the least likely reader for this novel, completely ignorant of the historical setting, and being someone who has read some noir classics but not widely or deeply. But, I have experienced this with Charyn before, reading his Cesare, a dark novel set in WWII Germany. I scramble after read......more

Goodreads review by Cindy on January 04, 2025

5 star rating My Review: I hated reading it! That's an odd thing to say about a book that I am giving 5 stars. Jerome Charyn dragged me kicking and screaming through the hellish landscape that is his version of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the very beginning of the 1900's. The world he builds is......more

Goodreads review by WeLoveBigBooksAndWeCannotLie on September 21, 2023

Happy Monday! And Happy Pub Day to Ravage and Son!!☀️ I hope you’re starting your week off with all the coffee you need and all the books that keep you up at night! Ravage and Son is Jerome Charyn’s newest book. We first were introduced to this author when we read Big Red a reimagined historical ficti......more

Goodreads review by Tony on October 03, 2023

Jerome Charyn has made a career of nudging rogues into respectability, sometimes famous rogues we already loved, and other times those he conjures, like Isaac Sidel. Ravage & Son is a kind of elegy to the worlds he shaped all those years, not a last statement (given that Charyn writes about a book a......more