Book jacket/back: In this beloved novel of immigrant life in Brooklyn, David Fuchs speaks to us in a distinctive, affecting voice. He evokes the special, marvelous qualities of the Jewish-American experience by creating characters and conflicts whose idiom and flavor he catches with uncanny precision. This is an exceptional novel about ordinary people. Each of the central characters lives in the same tenemant building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. This single building is a miniature of the teeming, dynamic community of which it is a part. It is inhabited by solitary souls and families. These people are students, idlers, shopkeepers, mothers, hustlers, lovers and husbands. Fuch's vivid, sharply observed prose folds these separate lives into a full-blooded human comedy. The story he tells reveals people living their lives with all the twists and dodges, the puzzles, the contradictions, the idiocies and the wonderful moments. In short, the busines of living, the banquet of life.