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At the age of 43, writer Allen Abel decided to move home to Brooklyn, stay with his mother (in the same apartment in which he grew up), and explore and write about the borough of his birth. For several months he wandered along Flatbush Avenue, the thoroughfare that runs like a spine through Brooklyn. The result is a delightful family memoir and exploration of a unique place. He hobnobs with Mohawk high-steel workers, tries to learn voodoo secrets from Haitian immigrants, commiserates with policemen detailed to the subway, and chats with an ex-zookeeper in Prospect Park. He revisits the scenes of his childhood, samples social life in distant Flatlands, and hunts for horseshoe crabs on the shoreline. "Flatbush Odyssey is a revelation, and in it Allen Abel has produced a marvellous piece of storytelling.

Over 40 historians, folklorists, and ordinary Brooklyn Jews present a vivid, living record of this astonishing cultural heritage. 150 illustrations. Map.

Excerpt from The Social History of Flatbush: And Manners and Customs of the Dutch Settlers in Kings County The Rev. Thomas M. Strong, D. D., for nearly forty years beloved pastor of the Reformed Church, Flatbush, collected, as far as practicable, facts pertaining to the early settlement of the town. These facts were in the first instance brought before the public in the form of lectures delivered before the Flatbush Literary Association. Subsequently, at the request of his friends, these lectures were collected in a volume, entitled "The History of the Town of Flatbush," and published in 1842. Since the publication of this interesting volume, there have been great changes in this little town. The day is probably not far distant when it will become a part of the adjoining city of Brooklyn; then all traces of its village life and its individuality as a Dutch settlement will he lost. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A Darkly Comic and Deeply Moving Memoir of a New York City Lost to Time, from the Author of the Bestselling John Lennon Bio Nowhere Man From the final days of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-1950s to the arrival of the Beatles in 1964, Bobby in Naziland is an unsentimental journey through one Brooklyn neighborhood. Though a 20 minute and 15-cent subway ride from the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Flatbush remained provincial and working-class?a place where Auschwitz survivors and WWII vets lived side by side and the war lingered like a mass hallucination. Meet Bobby, a local kid who shares a shabby apartment with his status-conscious mother and bigoted father, a soda jerk haunted by memories of the Nazi death camp he helped liberate. Flatbush, to Bobby, is a world of brawls with neighborhood "punks," Hebrew-school tales of Adolf Eichmann's daring capture, and grade-school duck-and-cover drills. Drawn to images of mushroom clouds and books about executions, Bobby ultimately turns the seething hatred he senses everywhere against himself. From a perch in his father's candy store, Bobby provides a child's-eye view of the mid-20th-century American experience?a poignant intertwining of the personal and historical.