SOURCE: A review of The Prince of West End Avenue, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. LXII, No. 6, March 15, 1994, p. 324.

[In the following favorable review, the critic recounts the plot of The Prince of West End Avenue.]

Memories of past sorrow and misspent passion come unbidden to an elderly Holocaust survivor in this elegant novel [The Prince of West End Avenue] when a woman bearing a resemblance to an old love joins the staff at a retirement home located on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

While most of the residents of the Emma Lazarus home are busy squabbling over the casting and the direction of Hamlet, Otto Korner, challenging ghosts of his own, feels appropriately cast as the Gravedigger. A published poet at 19, and unable to serve in the army, he is sent to Zurich by his family at the advent of World War I. There he meets a thoughtful, bookish...