Ravage & Son

A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 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.



Jerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With more than 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Since Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year and he received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Charyn lives in New York City.



'Charyn is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination.



'Charyn's sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.'



'One of our most rewarding novelists.'



'No one does it better than Charyn.'



'One of the most important writers in American literature.'



'Jerome Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.'