The Christmas Kid

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MOST OF THESE TALES were first published on Sundays by New York’s Daily News in the early 1980s. The original notion was to bring short fiction back into a newspaper, in the tradition of O. Henry in New York, Alberto Moravia in Rome, Kafū Nagai in Tokyo, and many others in many countries. These tales are set in Brooklyn, the large, dense, beautiful borough where I was born and grew up. I will carry the place with me to my grave.

Many of these stories are charged by the city’s most enduring emotion: nostalgia. Two factors still drive that emotion: the rapidity of change in New York and the immigrant roots of almost all its inhabitants. You go away for a month, and when you return your favorite coffee shop is being gutted to make way for another jeans shop. You ache for people gone, and places, and music, for lost loves, absent friends, vanished games, departed baseball teams. Immigrants might have been hurt into exile, as my parents were in the 1920s from Ireland, as millions are in today’s America, but they still yearn for old roads, familiar smells, special foods, for songs, for language, for old games, for parents and aunts and uncles, for homes where they knew every inch of each room, even in the dark. Whatever brought them to New York — bigotry, hunger, oppression, war — the Old Country was still the place where they once ran barefoot in the grass. Everyone’s present also contained a past. Then. Now.

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