By Meredith Deliso
rowing up in Brownsville on Saratoga Avenue during the 1930s and 1940s, Warren Adler remembers the infamous Jewish gangsters of Murder Incorporated who would frequent his corner candy store.
“I used to see them hanging out at the headquarters,” remembers Adler. “They would get their calls to kill people on [the] telephones…It's hard to believe, but true.”
Indeed, the idolized gangster era does seems the stuff of great fiction, and for Adler, it is. A prolific writer, the author celebrates the release of his 30th book this year with Funny Boys (Overlook Press), a fictional but authentic account of that era, set primarily in the Borscht Belt of the Catskills in the year 1937, where the Brooklyn gangsters vacationed during the summer to escape from the heat of the city and sometimes do some business.
This story isn't so much about those gangsters, but those on the periphery. There's Mikey Fine, a young, Jewish “funny boy” who gets a gig as a tumler – a general entertainer and comedian – at a Catskills resort. He gets pulled into the plight of Mutzie Feder, a Jean Harlow lookalike who, in her quest for the romance she saw on screen, gets tangled with the mob, pulling Mikey in with her as they try to get out of the Borscht Belt alive.
After dozens of books, novels and plays, the author, best known for The War of the Roses and Random Hearts, both made into films, says he naturally gets a lot of ideas out of his own life experience.
“I’ve had that whole book in my head for years now,” says Adler of Funny Boys, which may also grace the big screen one day with the rights sold, though nothing is in the works at this point. “It’s a world that’s disappeared.”
To bring that world to the page, Adler looked to New York Times articles from the period that covered Murder Inc., interviewed comedians who got their start in the Borscht Belt, such as Milton Berle and Red Button, and his own memory of how the gangsters spoke and the jokes the tumlers said as part of their schtick.
“What I wrote about is absolutely authentic,” says Adler. “The use of the expressions, the dialogue – I am absolutely convinced that I got it right, but then, I’m always convinced I got it right.”
Like the Jean Harlow-esque Mutzie, Adler himself was enamored by the movies.
“I can name you every single movie star, including the bit players,” says the writer. “I grew up with the movies. There was no television, no computers, only books and movies. The typical Saturday for a kid was to go to the movies in the afternoon and see two – a comedy and a serial.”
In Adler's day, there was the Ambassador Theater in Brownsville, the Blue Bird and the Empress on Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights, the Rogers Theater on Rogers Boulevard, the Cameo Theater on Eastern Parkway, and on and on throughout the borough.
Though Adler's memories of Brooklyn are sharp, it's only recently that he's returned to New York to live here full time after leaving at the age of 23 to fight in the Korean War. After living in Los Angeles and then Jackson Hole, Wyo., the author is back in New York, with two city-centric books to boot – Funny Boys and New York Echoes, a collection of short stories.
Adler went back to Brownsville several years ago to be principal for a day at his old school, P.S. 183 where he took a look around at the old neighborhood.
“I'd been away from Brooklyn for such a long time,” says the author. “The Brooklyn I knew was only in my head and in my memories. It's not the same – different place, different people. But that's the way the world goes.”
The Brooklyn Adler knew the author finds people are starting to be interested in.
“People want to know about that era – what was it like in Brooklyn in those days,” says Adler, recalling the egg creams and charlotte russes of the candy stores, the five cent frankfurters, the pushcarts that would stretch for blocks and sold everything you could imagine, the vendors yelling in Yiddish. “That's a whole world gone! Gone with the wind now, slowly disappearing… I wanted a new generation to have a record of it “
Warren Adler reads from Funny Boys on June 16 at the Mid Manhattan Library (40th Street and Fifth Avenue, 6th floor) at 6:30 p.m. He will also read on September 27 at the Brooklyn Public Library at 4 p.m. For more on the author, go to www.warrenadler.com
