Jerome Charyn: On the Darkening Green (USA 1965)

From the Publisher:
On the Darkening Green tells of Nick Lapucci, who upon the death of his schoolteacher and his friend Crazy Bemelman, leaves the Bronx for the Catskills, changes his name to Lipshitz, and takes a job as a teacher-counselor-warden in a home for delinquent and retarded Jewish boys. The time is World War II, and the home is run as a military camp with the boys living in barracks, drilling, and engaging in war maneuvers.

At the Blattenburg Home for Wayward Jewish Boys the reader will meet -- among other memorable characters -- Uncle Nate the director, Mama the social worker, Rabbi Rosencrantz, Shadrach the bull-dog, and the boys of D Company including Bullets Bucharevsky, Benny, Matches, the Indian, the Wolfman, and Little Notte.

The story tells of Nick's growing involvement with his charges, and is a delightful, amusing, and finally pathetic and moving work -- a novel of great impact, an achievement that more than fulfills the promise made by Mr. Charyn's earlier novel and short stories.

Jerome Charyn is twenty-seven years old and was graduated from Columbia College in 1959. He has taught English in New York at the High School of Music and Art and at the High School of Performing Arts, and is teaching English at the Baruch School of City College. He has published short stories in Commentary and Mademoiselle, is the author of Once Upon a Droshky, published in 1964, and is currently working on a new novel and a play.

Jerome Charyn: On the Darkening Green. A Novel. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965, 244 p., $4.95.