The Hermit of 69th Street: The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky

Norbert Kosky, a man of fifty-five, has withdrawn from ordinary life to live as a hermit on Sixty-Ninth Street in New York. He is a survivor of the Holocaust who came to America as an immigrant, and he now works as a writer, though his work has stalled. Restless and haunted by the past, he searches for a sense of spiritual order and for the freedom to be fully himself. The novel is presented as the working papers he leaves behind, and through them the reader follows his tangled, often compulsive attempts to make sense of his memories, his relationships and his place in the world.