The Bronx Against Everybody
By Frederick Mark Kramer
In a residence for the elderly on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a retired theater director sits in his leather wing chair and talks: to himself, to his wife Lily, who was lost in the pandemic, and to Helena, the tattooed, irreverent historian down the hall who has become his lover, though he insists they are not a couple. Out of his unbroken monologue a life assembles itself, out of order, as memory delivers it: a Bronx childhood spent in the silence of parents who never spoke of the Holocaust they had survived; a first love, who taught him to read The Merchant of Venice, and then vanished; the Village lofts and basements where he spent a career staging Witkiewicz, Mrożek and Beckett for small audiences; marriage, daughters, betrayals, and death. As he mounts what may be his final production, a man who spent sixty years running from the Bronx turns at last to reckon with what he fled and what he made of his escape. Frederick Mark Kramer’s The Bronx Against Everybody is a rich, moving portrait of old age and of New York City as a great living stage on which an examined life is improvised.
Frederick Mark Kramer is a novelist, playwright and amateur musician living on the Upper West Side of New York City.