Robert Rosen

Nelson Algren, best known for his novels The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, is also remembered for a couple of pithy quotes. One that I've long been familiar with is Algren's three rules of life: "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."

I recently came across another Algren quote that reminded me of my most recent book, A Brooklyn Memoir, set in Flatbush in the 1950s and 60s: "A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street." That's a good description of what I attempted to accomplish with East 17th Street.

Here's a paragraph that tells part of the story of that one street:

That was life on East 17th Street—a street I'd lived on for so long, I couldn't imagine not living on it; a street on which I got to know, in an intimate, visceral way, not just the people I fought with every day, but every tangible thing that made up the block: the alleyways, the buildings, their cellars—some of them converted into fallout shelters and stocked with giant khaki-colored cans filled with soda crackers and Kotex. With the building I lived in (and played Chinese handball in front of), I knew every crack in the sidewalk cement, I knew every brick that comprised the street-level masonry, I knew the mortar in between the bricks, and I knew especially well those two Doric columns in front, which it was my joy to climb upon, to cling to, and to press my cheek against and feel the coolness of the fluted gray stone.

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