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Save Me, Julie Kogon

by Allen Ruff

266 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #06-2077; ISBN 1-4251-0320-0; US$19.95, C$22.94, EUR16.39, £11.47

Who shows up for the funeral when Harry Rabin suddenly dies, and why? A revealing tale of Jewish New Haven's underside told with savvy wit and loving compassion.

About the Book

When Harry Rabin dies after collapsing in the yard of his fly-by-night used car lot, his three sons come together to bury "the ol' man." Flying from his Midwest home to a New Haven scene from which he had escaped, Davey Rabin steps headlong into that world that his oldest brother, the aging street guy Mickey, and Howard, the closeted all-business middle one, never left. Now confronted by Harry's passing, the three look to figure out the man's dying words and other secrets seemingly long buried.

Harry was "old school." The son of struggling Jewish immigrants, he came off of New Haven's Legion Avenue, that hard-pressed neighborhood where survival was the game and everything was a gamble. His story is told through vivid sometimes startling dream sequences and flashbacks - those of his hard-drinking life-long friend and undertaker, his Black girl friend, and a daughter unknown to the sons, among them. It's a saga filled with back room bookies and loan sharks, corrupt cops, prize fighters and late 40's Irgun gun smugglers as well as belaguered wives, lovers lost, and generations of abandoned kids left to navigate an uncertain world on their own.

About the Author

Allen Ruff is a former bartender, currently a book seller and cab driver, a story teller and political activist. He holds a Ph.D. in US History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A previously published historian, this is his first novel. Raised in New Haven, Connecticut, he currently calls Madison, Wisconsin home.

Excerpts