The Bronx in Short Trousers: Jerome Charyn’s Mischievous Childhood Recollections in The Dark Lady from Belorusse

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1997, Jerome Charyn published The Dark Lady from Belorusse. A Memoir, a recollection of his childhood in wartime Bronx focusing on a delightful evocation of his mother. If the text displays most of Charyn’s biographemes which are already well-known to his faithful readers (the Jewish neighbourhoods of the Bronx, his immigrant parents and his older brother Harvey, a childhood spent in poverty and acculturation …), it also reinvents the figure of his mother turned into a head-turning, mesmerising enchantress dealing with the local mafia. Charyn’s rewriting of his early years in a burlesque, vividly coloured narrative in which he paints himself as an ignorant child deeply in love with his mother allows him both to rewrite his mother’s failed American dream and to stage a comical version of his vocation as a writer.