[Pesetsky is an American novelist, short story writer, critic, and educator. In the following generally positive review, she notes that although Isler's novel has considerable emotional power, only Otto Korner, the narrator and protagonist, is a fully drawn character.]

Alan Isler uses to advantage the mythic power of the theater in his first novel The Prince of West End Avenue. But it turns out to be a distinctly unconventional sort of theater. As the story begins, a production of Hamlet is in rehearsal by a troupe whose actors are drawn from the residents of the Emma Lazarus retirement home on New York's Upper West Side. The fate of the play itself is uncertain, and chaos reigns. Death, you see, has already decimated the cast and threatens to do so again. In addition, all the contretemps involved in putting on a play are present—jealousies, casting problems, politics.

The Emma Lazarus is a world largely dominated by an émigré culture rich with allusions to the past, yet also with romances and rivalries, with the sense that life is definitely not over. There is a kind of nostalgia in Mr. Isler's depiction of his characters and the complex web of their memories. But curtains are drawn over parts of their lives, shielding nightmare events they cannot bear to examine too closely. The darkness of the past animates their present.

Otto Korner, an engaging and erudite retired librarian, is the novel's narrator; originally, he is cast as the ghost in Hamlet. The octogenarian Korner, once a published poet and writer of articles on literary subjects, now keeps a journal, whose aim is to clarify once and for all certain truths about "anti-art: in brief, Dada." A Holocaust survivor, he has lived, since his rescue, in search of a purpose.

Korner's memories are rattled by the appearance of young Mandy Dattner, a newly hired physical therapist. Can she be a reincarnation of the beautiful Magda Damrosch, who perished at Auschwitz? Recollections pull Korner back to the early decades of the century when, unable to serve in the Kaiser's army in World War I and thus a visible target for sentiments directed against his family in Germany, he was sent to Switzerland to continue his studies. It was on the way to Zurich that he first glimpsed the unattainable Magda and fell in love with her.

If Korner moved cautiously on the fringes of a changing world, Magda was in the thick of events, holding court at the Cabaret Voltaire with the artists Hans Arp and Max Oppenheimer and the poet Tristan Tzara. In Korner's memories of Magda, we witness the birth of the Dada movement.

The exiled Korner also met and had a drink with Lenin: "What did we talk about, Lenin and I? Not about political economy or the rights of the proletariat. You will scarcely believe me if I tell you that we spoke of love—or, rather, that I spoke of it." Korner even spent an evening listening to a noisy and unimpressive James Joyce. But what did such meetings mean? They were, Korner concludes, like much of life, to be considered merely coincidences.

Moving back and forth from the world of his memories to the present world of the Hamlet production, Korner finds only turbulence and change. With the death of Adolphe Sinsheimer, who was both the play's director and its Hamlet and the only Emma Lazarus resident with professional acting experience (as "a Ruritanian soldier in the movie The Prisoner of Zenda), the stage is set for new intrigues. Cabals form at Goldstein's Dairy Restaurant, with plots to take over the floundering Hamlet.

Mr. Isler displays a sharp and original wit, with touches of black humor. Some jokes are genuinely funny, as when the play's self-appointed replacement director, who fears offending Orthodox members of the audience, changes the line "Is she to be buried in Christian burial?" to "Is she to be buried in Mineola?" But at whom are we laughing?

Although the other émigrés are skillfully drawn, not one holds the fascination of Otto Korner. And the men, like Korner's friend Benno Hamburger, have a depth and complexity not shown by the residence's vocal and conniving women, who seem more like stock characters. Korner's second wife, the Contessa, whom be marries during his early retirement, is an exception as we spy on his recollections of their failed physical union, we wince as he cruelly describes her aging body.

Gradually, though, The Prince of West End Avenue emerges as a paradoxical tale of how to make peace with an unbearable past and the sin of pride. In a powerful scene toward the end of the novel, when Korner at last speaks at length of his first wife, Meta, and his son, the pettier concerns of the Emma Lazarus home abruptly diminish. It is then that we realize how much Otto Korner's story is able to haunt us.