Wild About Harry by Henry Grinberg

About the book

Wild About Harry is a coming-of-age story. Harry Glass is a ten-year-old boy growing up in a Jewish family in London around the beginning of the Second World War. He is constantly in trouble with his parents, who are lower-middle-class immigrants from Eastern Europe, struggling to understand him and adjust to English life and language.

There is a massive disconnect between Harry's view of things and that of the parents -- and practically everybody else. This leads to confrontations and collisions with teachers, relatives, school principals, aunts, and uncles. The consequences are at once menacing, affecting, and absurd -- all this against the backdrop of the rising menace for the world and Europe's Jews.

Harry is evacuated from London to Wales after the fall of France. Wales proves to be hardly idyllic. Ironically, this supposed safe haven is among the first areas that the Luftwaffe attacks. After a series of traumatic events -- a precocious sexual experience, subsequent betrayal, and being strafed by a German plane -- Harry suffers a breakdown, recuperates in a Military Hospital, and, ironically again, is sent back home just in time for the start of the London Blitz.

Harry ends up having learned quite a bit about the world and himself -- definitely bloodied, but definitely unbowed.

About the author

Henry Grinberg was born and educated in England, where he spent World War II as a schoolboy in London and as an evacuee in various parts of Britain and Wales. As such, he is one of a disappearing company of eyewitnesses to the events described in Wild About Harry.

Now a United States citizen, he holds a Ph.D. in medieval studies, has taught literature and writing at The City University of New York, and is the author of scholarly and popular articles and reviews. He has recorded selections from The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, released on the Medieval Sounds label. He is also a psychoanalyst with a practice in New York City. He is married to poet Suzanne Noguere.

Wild About Harry, a semi-authobiographical novel, is his first. It reflects some of his experiences during the War and growing up British, the child of immigrant Jewish parents from Eastern Europe. He is at work on a second novel, which reflects his interest in classical music and the giant egos to be found there, the Nazi era, and the strains and contradictions arising from the existence in the same person of evil and genius.