Jerome Charyn: Bronx Boy (USA 2002)

From the Publisher:
Jerome Charyn's three-part memoir of his boyhood in the Bronx has all the imagery and color of an enchanting and entertaining novel. It's been said that it captures the author's world so accurately that it can't possibly be true. Bronx Boy, like The Dark Lady from Belorusse and The Black Swan, both selected by The New York Times as Notable Books of the Year, is mixture of memory and imagination.

Still known as "Baby", although a younger brother has come along, young Charyn makes pocket money delivering eggs, belongs to a group of twelve-year-old wannabe gangsters who meet in a soda shop run by an ex-con, and spends afternoons telling stories to the adoring wife of a wealthy Russian emigre. He becomes famous for his black-and-tans - a concoction of coffee ice cream, seltzer, milk, chocolate sauce, crushed pecans, and "a touch of bitterness that may have been the Bronx". So famous, indeed, that he walks away the winner of an annual black-and-tan contest sponsored by the real-life top gangster, called "The Little Man", Meyer Lansky.

Jerome Charyn: Bronx Boy. A Memoir. Thomas Dunne Books, ISBN: 0312278101 (April, 2002), 184 p., $23.95.