A World of Darkness – Ravage & Son by Jerome Charyn

Set in the Jewish Lower East Side of Manhattan not long after the turn of the twentieth century, Abraham Cahan, the legendary editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, rescues Ben Ravage, a boy living at a trade school and home for orphaned boys and sends him to Harvard, where he earns a law degree. Ben, rather than joining a law firm, returns to the neighborhood and becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a Robin Hood sort of gang fighting corruption and violent crime.

Ben is the illegitimate son of Lionel Ravage, a cruel, swindling landlord and businessman who lives uptown among the other wealthy German Jews, including Jacob Schiff (who was in real life a principal at the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb and a prominent figure in charitable enterprises) who in this story operates various businesses, not all above board. The older Ravage lives a dark life making his downtown rounds, but he falls in love with and seduces the beautiful but impoverished Manya, who gives birth to Ben.

The story moves back and forth between the various principals and threads: Cahan, who is fighting F.W. Woolworth's plan to raze buildings on Grand Street in order to build another five and ten store, which he believes will change the character of the neighborhood and lead to gentrification that will drive out the poor and destroy a traditional mode of commerce; the conflicts between the two Ravages, Schiff's enterprises; and, Clara Karp, a fictional Yiddish theatre actress of tremendous influence who appears as a female Hamlet, and alongside the real-life king of Yiddish theater, Jacob Adler, known for his King Lear.

This is a complex and picaresque tale, violent to the point of gruesome, including some very graphic details I could certainly have done without, though they are important to understanding the characters. This Lower East Side is dark, and far beyond any tale of poverty, squalid living and working conditions, the press of Tammany Hall corruption, and the spread of vice, drugs, and violence against the innocent and often illiterate inhabitants of the area. Despite this darkness, this is still a fascinating portrait of a way of life that is now long gone, and barely remembered except in the memories of the aging grandchildren of the inhabitants of that era.