Hollywood Park: A Novel

The year is 1934, hardly a favorable time to be starting life as an adult. The starry twenties had seemed bright enough to light the years ahead for Chicagoans Richard and Dorothy Sherman and David and Simmie Weiss. But the Thirties have dropped an opaque curtain between them and their stars. The Depression stalks them through the pages of the novel like a faceless, voiceless character itself. No one can escape its discouraging shadow, not even Simmie’s obsessed ex-husband, Joe Mostowitz, who possesses money but not the thing he wants most – Simmie. She, of them all, sees not the hard times, but the glamorous ones assured her by the gorgeous face and figure she studies every day in the mirror. Simmie believes she has a destiny, and nothing, not even a goddam depression, is going to deprive her of it.

From a time not so long ago when insulin was the only miracle drug, and when anti-semitism was nearly an epidemic in the United States, here is the story of the Sherman and Weiss families, who struggled to preserve their pride and hold onto their dreams in the tiny Chicago neighborhood with the dreamy name . . . Hollywood Park.

Martin Marcus’s credits include a radio comedy show and award-winning network documentaries. He is a published humorist with books from Lippincott – the best-selling Yiddish for Yankees or Funny You Don’t Look Gentile – and Doubleday, The Power of Yiddish Thinking. His poetry collection, File Under Melancholy, Troika V, was acclaimed by Pulitzer Prize poet Maxine Kumin. This is his first novel. He lives with his wife Sue in Wilmette, Illinois.

What some reviewers have said about his work:

"authentic humor" – Saturday Review

". . .flippant, amusing, successful" – Library Journal

". . .fills a long felt need. Cleverly done, I salute Mr. Marcus" – Harry Golden, author, Only In America

"Martin Marcus’s intelligent script" – Variety

"Marty Marcus is a great pure writer" – Backstage

Much of the talk that year among the young mothers in Dorothy’s community was of the Dionne quintuplets, born in May. Even into late November, in good weather they gathered daily with their perambulators on the benches in the small common that the surrounding neighborhood took its name from: Hollywood Park. What dreamer in the Department of Naming had invoked that frothy image for this thirty-two square block jumble of courtyard flats and bungalows interrupted everywhere by gaps of empty lots like a bad set of teeth?

The women sat surrounding a pleasant rock garden that had been recently installed by Civil Works Administration men, which, in itself, had been a topic for some time. Was it proper, they had argued on all sides of the question, for the government to be paying workers to build impractical but nice things like rock gardens when the money could be put exclusively to basic needs like sewers or pavement? In the end, the women came out on the side of rock gardens.

But now it was Dionne, that name you heard everywhere. In Canada, five little girls, identical quintuplets, and all surviving. It had never happened before in history.

"And the father is poor," clucked one of the mothers, rocking her child in its buggy.

"Poor?" said another woman with an edge, "Oh, you mean not like us?"

"Well...a farmer. What bad luck in a depression."

"Great good luck, I’d say," offered a third woman. "The Canadian government is adopting them. They’re a national treasure, for heaven’s sake."

Dorothy entered the conversation. She shook her head. "I think it’s very sad. Those little girls will be on display all their lives like freaks."

"What about the mother? You never hear much about the mother."

"They’re Catholics. She’s very religious."

"And she already had five children. She must be in a state."

"But can you imagine, the government owning your children?" They all stopped talking. None of the mothers gathered here in the miniature Chicago park had more than two children of her own. Most had but one and planned no more. Not until times improved.

One observed, "Jean Fisher’s twins were in the World’s Fair this year. They were in an exhibit demonstrating the new incubators for prematures. I think the Fishers got paid for it."

Which made another wince. "She let her babies be on public display for money? I don’t know how I feel about that."

"I do!" said the rest in unison.

All the talk about the Dionne girls made Dorothy look off at her own daughter, Joyce, nearly five, who was scrambling over the boulders in the dormant rock garden. "Mommy," the little girl called, "can I get ice skates?" It was still too early for snow, but sometimes the wind whispered its secret plans to children.