The Yiderati: “Diamond Ruby” Author Joseph Wallace Guest Blogs

Joseph Wallace is the author of the novel Diamond Ruby.  He will be blogging over the next week for Jewcy on 3 subjects we asked him to expound upon.  This week we gave him the topic "old time Brooklyn."

As time passes, every era gets boiled down to a few essential images. The Roaring Twenties, for example, today call to mind glittering lights, full champagne glasses, and flappers showing more than just "a glimpse of stocking."

Perhaps this shorthand is inevitable. As I discovered while writing my first novel, Diamond Ruby (which is set largely in 1923), however, too much is lost when we forget the richness and complexity of each era in exchange for just those obvious details.

Researching the 1920s in New York City, I did find a world of movie stars and socialites and spotlights illuminating the skies. But I also learned about something more interesting: the desperation that lay behind the decade’s roar.

The 1920s were a direct outgrowth of two cataclysmic events of the late 1910s, both of which hit New York (and especially Brooklyn) hard: Brutal, bloody World War I and the rampaging influenza epidemic of 1918.

New York was both a departing point for men and material heading towards war-stricken Europe and a place where soldiers’ bodies returned. Then, just as the war was winding down, influenza entered New York from a cruise ship docked in Brooklyn. Thousands died in the city alone during the next few weeks as people hid in their homes and coffins piled up unburied.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the end of the Great War and the waning of the epidemic led to the Roaring Twenties, with its focus on celebrity and embrace of partying even in the years of Prohibition. (There were dozens of terms for being drunk, one sillier than the next: spifflicated, zozzled, owled, fried to the hat.) But the darkness was inescapable: Almost everyone had either lost someone in the war or the epidemic, or knew people who had. No one felt immortal: they just pretended they did.

Thus we got not just dance parties but dance marathons, complete with frequent news reports of competitors being dragged off to hospitals in a state of physical collapse. Thus it was simultaneously an extraordinary period for women’s rights-the richest before the 1960s-and a time when the Ku Klux Klan was flexing its power, even infiltrating Brooklyn’s police department. Thus the famous filled brand-new Yankee Stadium and ambled along the new Coney Island Boardwalk, while the poor risked their lives in unregulated factory jobs, too often dying unnoticed and unidentified. Thus President Warren Harding passed away in office and was widely mourned even as the first whispers of his administration’s rampant corruption began to circulate.

What a fascinating, dizzying time it must have been to live in New York City. Even by immersing myself in that world-by hitching a ride with Diamond Ruby- I felt ensnared by both its fierce appeal and its dangers. In the absence of a time machine to carry me back there, I couldn’t have found a better time or place to set a novel.