Norman Green

The Angel of Montague Street

THE ANGEL OF MONTAGUE STREET was my sophomore effort. When HarperCollins bought my first book, they gave me a two-book contract, which meant I had to write another book. That was a frightening thought, particularly when I didn’t have a clear idea how I’d written the first one, what I had done wrong and what I had done right. Well, I started with the same basic premise: Brooklyn as the lead character, except this time I used the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights in the nineteen-seventies. It was the Brooklyn that I landed in when I was nineteen. I was young, ignorant, alone, scared, and afraid to admit to any of it, even to myself. Brooklyn Heights was a bit down at the heels at the time, a somewhat seedy place that reminded you, every chance she got, what she had been when she was young and beautiful.

New Yorkers have a reputation for being cold and unfriendly, but that was not my experience. I survived those first few years in Brooklyn mostly due to a lot of kind and caring people who helped me get by.

So this guy, Silvano Iurata, comes back to Brooklyn in ’73. He thinks he needs to find out what happened to his brother, but it’s really himself he’s looking for. He meets a beautiful and exotic woman (Hey, I did that…), pursues her (Yeah! Me, too!), and begins to deal with who and what he is.

The flophouse Silvano stays in is called, in the story, The Hotel Montague, which I modeled after a joint called The Bossert, a glorious ruin which has since been through detox and rehab and is now in private hands. The Turkish woman who changes Silvano’s life takes up with him somewhat against her better judgment. Don’t they all? I got married in The Bossert to a beautiful woman, Macedonian, not Turkish, who certainly could have done better.

Hey, that’s life…

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