American Dreams by Kenneth Bromberg

The first thing to note about this historical crime/family saga from the new publisher Flame Tree Press is its cover. I mean, wow, is that a cover. It’s not just this book either, I’ve seen several titles from Flame Tree Press and they put a lot of thought into their covers. In an increasingly crowded literary field, with traditional publishers having to compete with each other, with hybrid publishers, and self-published titles, anything to get a book noticed is more important than ever. Flame Tree Press publish hardbacks, paperbacks and digital versions of their books, but even on digital, a cover is massively important. If the cover art doesn’t scream out at potential buyers from the Amazon Kindle, Nook or iBooks storefront then it’s easily overlooked. So Flame Tree Press are to congratulated, for their covers, not least for this novel, are a thing of wonder.

The cover of American Dreams isn’t just great cover art, it also speaks to what the story is about. Its artwork of the Statue of Liberty cradling a Tommy gun tells you that this will be a novel about immigrants to America (for certainly at the turn of century when people would arrive by boat at Ellis Island, the eponymous statue would be the first thing they would see) and how some might get involved in organised crime (is there anything more indicative of the mafia wars at the time than the Tommy gun?). And indeed this is what American Dreams is about. 

Max is just four when his Jewish family is massacred in an anti-semitic pogrom in Czarist Russia. His father is his sole surviving relative, and together they flee into Europe, and from there they sail to the United States. Jonathan Cahill is the son of an IRA man about to be hanged. Visiting his father in prison, he is surprised when his father begs him to travel to America to make a life for himself rather than join the struggle. This he does and relatives take him in. Max and Jonathan grow up in New York and their paths cross as both try to make their way in the world.

American Dreams’ title is literal. The two are immigrants who came to the United States for the same reasons that immigrants have always gone there and still do to this day: in the hopes of making a better life for themselves, in effect to chase the American Dream. And like generations before and since, some make it and some have fallen by the wayside. And of those who make it, some do so legitimately, some illegitimately, and many achieve a messy combination of the two. Like all walks of life, organised crime in the United States has often mirrored trends in migration. There have been Jewish, Italian and Irish mobsters. Currently, Latin American gangs such as MS13 are the bogeymen. Of course, the vast majority of these communities don’t get involved in crime, but this novel is a crime/family saga and so it tells the story of that minority who do.

There’s something of the Godfather to this sweeping novel. This is a narrative the timeframe of which is generations, with a cast of characters to match. Apparently, the author found inspiration in stories of his own family passed down from his grandmother. It’s an involving tale that has the full gamut of experience: love, life, and death. All in all, it’s an intriguing tale well told.

4 out 5 stars