Broadway Serenade

Broadway Serenade is a serio-comic Jewish American novel that dramatizes the conflict between loyalty to family and the liberation of romantic love as this conflict is embodied in the quest of Larry Mann to find himself (that favourite American Preoccupation) at an age, late 30’s, when most mature American men are tired of being themselves. Hopelessly and haplessly in love with a spirited young woman, a Rabbi’s daughter (who is trying to escape the restraints of her orthodox background), Larry (who is trying to escape the commercial world of his father’s New York City garment business through writing), looks to Ellen as the means of escape and muse. Set in New York City at the end of the counter-cultural period (the era of Vietnam protest) and the beginning of neo-conservative Reaganomics, the Novel explores — in ways at once ruminative and lyrically erotic — the competing claims of restraint and freedom and restraint, the echoes of the past and the vibrations of the present Moving between the immigrant past of the residual Bohemianism of Greenwich Village, Larry tries to strike a balance between ancient and contemporary mysteries. In winning, Larry loses; he wins. At once hero and schlemiel (fool), he floats through and above Manhattan. This twentieth century American novel depicts a struggle between tradition and modernity at a number of levels and wolf believes that "this struggle will speak, in its way, to contemporary India which is undergoing different versions of this conflict." Realistic and visionary, Broadway Serenade moves to the music of humanity.