A New York native looks back on his Lower East Side youth in a trilogy from the New York Timesbestselling author and Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright After making a splash with his first novel I Can Get It for You Wholesalepublished in 1937 and praised by the likes of Hemingway and FitzgeraldJerome Weidman had a long and prolific career as a fiction writer and playwright In the 1970s he published three wise funny and nostalgic novels about the Lower East Side roots of a colorful character named Benny Kramer For the first time the trilogy is available in a single volume with a foreword by Alistair Cooke Fourth Street East When Benny Kramers father came to the United States he was hungry broke and ignorant Handed a banana and told it was American food he scarfed it down peel and all By the time he died he was no richer but much wiser and everything he learned he imparted to his son Growing up on New Yorks Lower East Side between the wars Bennys life was just as chaotic as his neighborhood How many young boys have seen a man decapitated by a horse How many know blacksmiths who got tangled up in a multiple homicide How many win an elocution contest only to find out it was rigged by the mob For Benny these are everyday events remembered with biting wit and fond affection This is all much more than noodle soup nostalgiatheres humor and stamina and if middle age has rubbed off here and there it has also lent a certain wisdom Kirkus Reviews Last Respects For most of his life Benny Kramers mother was an inescapable presence in his life But on the day of her death her body disappears on its way from hospital to morgue While scouring New York in search of her body Benny remembers the first adventure his mother sent him on fifty years before At the height of Prohibition his mother gives him a simple task deliver eighteen bottles of bootlegged hooch to a wedding Along the way the wouldbe rumrunner encounters sinister slumlords a sadistic rabbi and enough slapstick obstacles to give the Marx Brothers fits Reliving each moment as he searches for his mother Benny comes to understand that this is just another day in the life of a boy desperate to find his mothers love The last respects are paid with comic tumult and an acute compassion Weidman at the apex Kirkus Reviews Tiffany Street Though his trip from New York to Philadelphia is for business Benny Kramer has also planned a rendezvousnot with a mistress but with one of the citys finest doctors Kramer plans to enlist him in a noble purpose keeping his son out of Vietnam The doctor wont provide this service to just anyone but he and Benny have a mutual friend in the incomparable Sebastian Roon Benny and Seb have been friends since the Depression when they shared countless adventures across New Yorks Lower East Side Now Bennys counting on that friendship to ensure the same life of endless possibilities for his son Highly readable Chicago Tribune