The Red Heifer: A Novel

In the melting pot of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the elder son of religious, Yiddish-speaking parents narrates The Red Heifer, which takes place in the period from the late 1930s, when he is five, through his adolescence in the early 1950s. American-born, he grows to sexual and social awareness amid old-world rabbis, new-world mobsters, Jewish nonbelievers, musicians, and new waves of immigrants. The growing boy struggles with love and death amid poverty, crime, and fervent religion and politics. He passionately evokes the largely vanished working-class Jewish Lower East Side as a sometimes violent place in which characters strive to observe pious duties, to make a living, and to assimilate.
The Red Heifer teems with unforgettable characters like the narrator's childhood idol, hoodlum Big Red; his father, a Talmudic scholar; his first love, Aunt Geety; Uncle Oosher; the tragic Feygy Grossman and her brothers: and a street person, Reb Yussl, who claims to be the Messiah. They grapple, memorably, with traditional values and the cultural enticements of their new goldene medine (golden land).