Jerome Charyn's three-part memoir of his boyhood in the Bronx has all the imagery and color of an enchanting and entertaining novel -- someone has said that it captures the author's world so accurately that it can't possibly be true. Bronx Boy , like The Dark Lady of Belorusse and The Black Swan , both selected by The New York Times as Notable Books of the Year, is a tour de force of memory and imagination. In this third and final installment, the higher truths of a masterly writer's art render moot the question of exactly where the real world ends and Charyn's imagined world begins. Still known as "Baby" although a younger brother has come along, young Charyn makes pocket money delivering eggs, belongs to a group of 12-year-old wannabe gangsters that meet in a soda shop run by an ex-con, and spends afternoons telling stories to the adoring wife of a wealthy Russian émigré. He becomes famous for his black-and-tans -- a concoction of coffee ice cream, seltzer, milk, chocolate sauce, crushed pecans -- and "a touch of bitterness that may have been the Bronx." So famous, indeed, that he walks away the winner of an annual black-and-tan contest sponsored by the real-life top gangster called "The Little Man" -- Meyer Lansky. In Charyn's hands, the often ridiculed Bronx is a magic place, as full of odd and wonderful characters as a three-ring circus. And at the center of it all, young "Baby," not as lucky in love as he would like to be, drinking it all in, putting his own extraordinary take on it. Charyn looks back at this with his singular vision, and records it all for us with the skill of the fine writer he is. This is a delightful and often moving story of a childhood that could only have been lived in New York in the fifties, a New York experience that could only have taken place in the Bronx of those days, a growing-up saga that could only have been captured by this singular author.

How to describe Faigele? A recent immigrant from Russia, the wife of an immigrant fur worker, a mother, a housewife, a greenhorn - and an enchantress of such striking beauty that she had the Bronx at her feet. The local postmaster consoled her with hot tea in his office every morning when she came with "Baby" Jerome, hoping for a letter from her brother in war-torn Russia. An admirer enlisted five-year-old Baby to help him produce a forged letter to ease her worry. But it was her dentist, a blackmarketer on the side, who introduced her to the circle of Bronx politicians who made her the dealer of their weekly poker game. Beautiful, passionate, worlds above words like "naive or sophisticated," Faigele has been blessed by her son, a rarely gifted writer who vividly recaptures this astonishing woman in her turbulent setting.

Using himself as the persona, the author interviews the police commissioner concerning racism and a SoHo dealer on art, invades Brooklyn Mafia dens and a Times Square sex palace, and explores a shelter for the homeless

A Memoir"It was easy to invent a fable.When the letters did come from school, I'd scratch out a note in my father's hand, talk of fatigue, visits to the brain surgeon, etc.The East Bronx was like the Sahara, where a child and all his records could get lost in some infinite sand dune."What does an 11 year-old boy do when his classmates call him "Dumbo" and his parents don't seem to know that he exists?His mother, the beautiful Faigele spends her days pushing her 2 year-old son Marvin around in a stroller and barely hears Jerome's clarinet playing. The answer for Jerome Charyn is to go to the local movie house and hide out for a few hours every day.At the movies, he can escape, not be himself for a little while. One day, while watching Samson and Delilah for the seventh time that week, he is suddenly grabbed from his seat, dragged down a flight of stairs and winds up being introduced to a whole new way of life by three "cellar rats," as Jerome likes to call them.They make him a part of their group and he soon finds himself dressed in a Feuerman & Marx suit collecting money for Farouk, the local gangster. Many of the men remember his mother, The Dark Lady, from her days as dealer of their local poker game.With his distinctive style, a deep and accurate feeling for time and place, and an uncanny ability to communicate the world as seen through the imagination of an unusual boy, Charyn has created another gem of a memoir, a worthy sequel to The Dark Lady from Belorusse.