The open door

It is the late 1930s when Myron Adler and Faye Raskin - the most mismatched couple imaginable - meet and marry. Myron owns a live poultry market in the Brooklyn Battery and Faye, the haughty and pretentious daughter of a well-to-do Manhattan jeweler, leads a fantasy life filled with high-class suitors. Through the 40s and 50s, as the Adlers raise two sons, their difficulties erupt in troubling, sometimes violent ways. The Open Door, Floyd Skloot's powerful third novel, traces how Richard and Daniel Adler respond to a home environment of physical and emotional abuse and grow up to become radically different men. With candor and precision, Skloot captures the nuances of second-generation Jewish immigrant life. He skillfully presents the pulse of mid-century Brooklyn - where the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Mad Bomber, Mafia heavies and two-bit boxers populate a world the Adler brothers struggle to comprehend.