About the Book
It's June 1953, and 10-year-old Marc Straus is in his mother's car, getting sick from her cigarette smoke on his way to a Hebrew lesson. He and his brother, Stephen, are transferring from public school to a Yeshiva. His parents haven't said why-the family isn't religious. All Marc knows is he'll have to protect Stephen, a delicate kid other kids pick on. Marc's a street fighter who knows how to wall off pain.
So begins One-Legged Mongoose, Marc Straus's vivid, compelling, you-are-there memoir of two years in the life of a precocious, scrappy Jewish kid carrying a dark secret as he embarks on the journey to young manhood in 1950s New York. When school starts, Marc begins commuting four hours daily to a different world, where kids are smart like him and a caring principal takes the troubled truant under his wing. On Sundays, Marc works at his dad's textile store, learning about honor and hard work. At home, he faces his volatile mother.
A perceptive, courageous kid, Marc encounters anti-Semitism in public school, the community, and the Boy Scouts. On a camping trip, his troop leader asks the boys to search for a half-man-half-beast predator called the One-Legged Mongoose who devours human prey. "Why not?" Marc reasons. "I know all about monsters."
Sidelined too often by illness and accidents, including a bout with polio and being hit by a car, Marc starts rethinking his risk-taking way of life and realizes he's not invincible. Life will wound him, but the rest is up to him.
One-Legged Mongoose is a warm, funny, searing memoir about the challenges of crossing from childhood to young adulthood. It's an inspiring story of one boy's struggle to survive an abusive home, understand the world around him, and embrace responsibility for his own life.
About the Author :
Marc J. Straus is a poet, writer, medical oncologist, and art collector who lives with his wife, Livia, in Chappaqua, New York. A former professor of medicine and Chief of Oncology at New York Medical College and Westchester Medical Center, he is the author or co-author of some 100 scientific papers and editor of three textbooks on lung cancer. He is also the author of four poetry collections, including Not God, a play in verse that was staged Off Broadway, and The Bridge, a series of poems in the voice of a female cancer patient that served as the basis of a multimedia exhibit at Lehigh University's Zoellner Art Center in 2004. Marc's poems and stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Field, TriQuarterly, F&M Alumni Arts Review, and many other literary journals. He was awarded a Yaddo residency in poetry in 1993 and presented the annual Robert Penn Warren lecture sponsored by Yale's Program for Humanities in Medicine in 1998. He took gold in a New York City judo tournament in 1967 and coached the U.S. Karate Team at the Tenth Maccabiah in Israel in 1977. Marc has published more than 50 articles on contemporary art. The collection he and Livia have amassed has been featured in numerous magazines and exhibited at 12 museums in the U.S. The Strauses founded Hudson Valley MOCA, a public museum of contemporary art in Peekskill, New York, and Marc currently runs MARC STRAUS, a contemporary art gallery located on Manhattan's Lower East Side across the street from the former site of his father's textile store. One-Legged Mongoose is his first book of prose. Learn more at marcjstraus.com.
Review :
"There are pivotal years in life when everything changes and comes into focus. In this touching memoir, Marc Straus reaches back to two eventful years in his childhood and retells them in rich and vivid detail. There are secrets and accidents and illnesses and, most of all, awakenings. Ultimately, One-Legged Mongoose is about how a sometimes abused, sometimes loved, and always bookish boy becomes a man. It is a moving story that will make readers think about their own journeys."
-Ari L. Goldman, professor of journalism, Columbia University, and author of The Search for God at Harvard
"Marc Straus, writing as his ten-year-old self, tells us 'Memories often stay in me as though they might be now, ' and that is why reading One-Legged Mongoose, utterly enthralled, is to live two catastrophic years in the now of this lovable, wise kid, down to the finest details. In this prodigious act of memory, one imperfect family in the America of the '50s is seen through the clear gaze of an acute student of reality who captivates us with his matter-of-fact profundity, his brave refusal to look away. The book is a wonder, as close to the recovered experience as language can provide, and the title is an apt metaphor for the fearmongering that drives so much of history, then and now."
-Eleanor Wilner, MacArthur Award-winning author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems
"In One-Legged Mongoose, Marc Straus boldly assumes the point of view of the preadolescent boy he was in the early 1950s, when his story takes place. Because his recall is so remarkably vivid and detailed, and because the young Marc was so keenly aware of the historical and personal violence that shaped his character, the result is a riveting and insightful account of an American Jewish childhood in the shadow of the Great Depression and the Holocaust."
-Matthew Sharpe, author of Jamestown and The Sleeping Father
"Marc Straus has written an astonishing memoir full of humor and hilarity, heart and vision. This year's sleeper hit, I predict. A must-read!"
-Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and Lit
"Marc Straus's One-Legged Mongoose is a wry and insightful memoir of a bright, resourceful New York boy who survives polio, endures a four-hour daily commute to a Yeshiva in Queens, and tells no one about the secret abuse he suffers at home. A great addition to the lore of New York in the era following WWII."
-Dan Wakefield, author of New York in the Fifties and Spiritually Incorrect
