The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler
A bittersweet comedy set in a Jewish Old People's home in New York, this is a stunningly mature first novel. Comedy and tragedy combine as our hero, Otto Korner directs his quirky, libidinous fellow residents in a chaotic production of Hamlet and looks back over his adventures in Germany, Zurich (where he met Lenin and inadvertently invented Dada), Auschwitz and America.