THE APPLE AND THE SHADY TREE

In this memoir, a woman recounts her New York upbringing and investigates her father’s mob ties.

Goldberg’s book begins in 1987. One night, she and her then-husband, Mark, were in their New York City apartment, watching the local news. The lead story was about the murder of Irwin Schiff, who was shot in the head while dining at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. Schiff had ties to the mob, but the author knew him for another reason: “Irwin Schiff was one of my father’s best friends du jour.” Soon, the FBI was at her door, and Goldberg was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. “How the hell did I get to this point?” she asks incredulously. In the subsequent chapters, she jumps back in time to find out, sketching portraits of her parents and tracing her own upbringing. Her parents met in Brooklyn, fell in love, got married. Her father ran a sports-betting operation for Funzi Tieri, a notorious loan shark and “eventual capo of the Genovese family.” The author was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1958; six years later, the family moved to the Five Towns on Long Island. Soon, Goldberg had a sibling: “My sister was conceived after a night of drinking champagne at the Copacabana.” The memoir is full of details, anecdotes, and short profiles of colorful characters, but the author’s parents remain shrouded in lingering wisps of mystery. She can only speculate as to the scope and severity of her mother’s mental health struggles, and her father’s various business activities are never fully illuminated. For instance, Goldberg asserts that he was involved in the record industry for decades, but she didn’t learn about it until the 1980s. His work made him secretive, but the author sensed a resistance to settling down: “My dad did make a few attempts to fulfill my vision of suburban family life, but let’s just say, he wasn’t cut out for the part.”

Goldberg is a steady chronicler of her family history and the years of her childhood and adolescence. As one would expect from a mob-focused memoir, the names of fringe characters are delightful and might be hard to believe if not for the American familiarity, through film and television, with Mafia nomenclature. In these pages, readers meet Dom, Funzi, Tony Lunch, Johnny Sausage, and Benny Eggs. Though the author’s memoir delivers on its promise to present a realistic look at her father’s ties to the Genovese crime family, the true success of the work is how well it encapsulates a time and place: New York of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. Goldberg peppers the lively book, which includes family photographs, with mentions of bygone places: Schrafft’s; the Jade Cockatoo in Greenwich Village; the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens; Lundy’s Restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She also powerfully evokes her suburban childhood, which, despite her father’s dealings, occasionally seems idyllic, as when she and some neighborhood kids played in the Valley Stream dump on Long Island: “We climbed on hills of dirt scattered with junk that included old bottles, rebar, shoes, and an occasional appliance.” Throughout the memoir, the author’s fondness for the past helps her soberly assess a sometimes chaotic, sometimes comical, and sometimes painful family life.

An honest, funny, and thorough reflection on a complicated family.