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About Ravage & Son

A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early twentieth-century Manhattan Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan's Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror. Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward , serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish "Mr. Hyde," a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man. A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.