[In the following review, Schoenbaum notes some of the historical references in The Prince of West End Avenue and praises Isler as "a novelist to be watched."]

Yesterday, the narrator of this novel [The Prince of West End Avenue] tells us, he celebrated his 83rd birthday. The year is 1978. Eventually, he wryly observes, we'll find him just south of Mineola, Long Island, where he'll be taking up his subterranean residence. Otto Korner is his name—dropping the umlaut over the "o" being his first concession to America. These days he resides at the Emma Lazarus Retirement House on West End Avenue in Manhattan.

Who was Emma Lazarus? Students of New York's history and probably few others will know of her as a spokeswoman and forgotten poet ("Songs of a Semite") remembered, if at all, for a sonnet about the Statue of Liberty, "The New Colossus," which is engraved on the pedestal of the statue in New York City harbor. "That is no country for old men," begins a celebrated early modern poem. Korner is an old man, but he has not sailed to Byzantium but to the New World.

Constipation besets him, as it does other elders: A local wag calls their little home the Enema Lazarus, a witticism from the house specialist in coprological humor. In house-lingo Korner appears in a daily list of solo ambulants rather than sedentary residents, so he can still walk about and have coffee and play dominoes at Goldstein's Dairy Restaurant on Broadway, a short distance from the Emma Lazarus. Certainly Korner is not burning and raving at close of day (as another poem would have it); but he is not going gentle into that good night, either.

He is haunted by memories. Twice widowed, he finds solace taking part in the Emma Lazarus Old Vic, which specializes in performing the classics. In their recent production of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet was 73 and Romeo was 78. When Romeo killed Tybalt, it was Romeo who fell, and had to be carried on a stretcher from the stage. He can now be found in Mineola. Currently a production of Hamlet is in the works. The star, to guard against a midnight hunger pang, secreted away a lump of sugar, which he choked on in his room. Thus he discovered how sweet it is to die. Korner is set to play a Ghost or a Gravedigger, in any event a spectral presence. The text of Hamlet is savored with a plethora of allusions and quotations. For Korner is a literary gent, employed before retirement by the New York Public Library.

Reared in a comfortable middle-class Jewish Berlin household, some years before Schindler compiled his list, young Korner seemed destined for the literary life. A precocious poem by him elicited an encouraging letter from the great Rilke. Korner held on to his tattered letter even in an extermination camp of the Third Reich. Unlike his first love, Magda Damrosch, whose short life was snuffed out in a gas chamber, Korner is a Holocaust survivor. Not until late in the novel is the number on his wrist commented upon. The Rilke letter, by now almost undecipherable, mysteriously disappears at the Emma Lazarus. So what? It is only an old handwritten letter from what's-his-name. Ultimately it resurfaces.

The other woman in Korner's life is Mandy Dattner, a youthful Ph. th. (physical therapist) from Shaker Heights Community College in Cleveland, who works with him at the Emma Lazarus. Her presence reminds him of Magda, in part because of the analogous disyllables of their names.

In Korner's memory, celebrated personages make their entrances and exits at a Zurich restaurant, where a cadaverous-looking man with thick eyeglasses sits with others singing songs and telling jokes in sundry languages. Magda lifts her glass to toast him. Korner thinks him an unmannered oaf. He looks like a down-at-heels dandy: "A lifetime later," Korner observes, "leafing through the photographs in Ellman's [sic] classic biography, I discovered to my surprise and embarrassment that this 'unmannered oaf' had been the great Irish writer James Joyce, even then, in 1916, at work on his incomparable Ulysses."

Also in Zurich he chatted and had a drink with Lenin at the Cafe Odeon. Zurich, Lenin, and Joyce—shades of Tom Stoppard, a very different presence and literary talent from Isler.

"If it be now, it is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now, if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all." So Hamlet to Horatio, who has well-justified misgivings before the culminating duel with Laertes in the final scene of the play. "The readiness is all"—it is the last sentence of the novel. In time Korner becomes the director of the Emma Lazarus Old Vic and plays Hamlet. The Prince of West End Avenue becomes the Prince of Denmark.

And who is Alan Isler? A Brit by origin, he hobnobs with ex-colonials in the Big Apple. A member of the English Department at Queens College of the City University of New York, he is currently renewing acquaintance with the old country. I expect that The Prince of West End Avenue will deservedly delight many readers. Isler is a novelist to be watched.