The Prince of West End Avenue

by Alan Isler

Comedy and tragedy are combined in The Prince of West End Avenue as Otto Korner, the narrator, directs his quirky, libidinous fellow residents of a retirement home in a production of Hamlet, all the while recalling his life's adventures spanning the 20th century in Europe and then America. Korner is a Holocaust survivor, and the arrival of a luscious new employee who bears a shocking resemblance to a woman he had loved in his youth throws him back into the past. The narrator weaves together past and present, with events cresting at the performance of Hamlet. Though the machinations of the Emma Lazarus retirement home's Dickensian residents are always in the novel's foreground, the character and history of the narrator, Hamlet-like himself, are gradually revealed as the story's integral backdrop. His flashbacks include his precocious beginnings as a would-be poet, his bungled encounters with the incipient Dada movement and with Lenin in World War I Zurich, his first marriage and his lif