The Prince of West End Avenue
The Prince of West End Avenue is the first novel by Alan Isler, published in 1994. The novel is a first-person narration by Otto Korner (formerly Körner) and intertwines a comedy about staging Hamlet in a Jewish retirement home, the Emma Lazarus, with flashbacks concerning the early life of the protagonist, his two marriages, the creation of Dada, and the Holocaust. It won the National Jewish Book Award and the JQ Wingate Prize and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996. Described by The New York Times  as 'a paradoxical tale of how to make peace with an unbearable past and the sin of pride', the novel only reveals the tragic events haunting the narrator just before the end, lending perspective to the comic concerns of the staging of "Hamlet". Characters. In addition, there are small parts played by Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara.