The Prince of West End Avenue [antikvár]

I HE LAST FEW WEEKS have not been easy for me. After an absence of sixty years, Magda Damrosch has reentered my life and my system is in turmoil. I cannot sleep and I am troubled by constipation. How ironic that the release of the psychological mechanism should be accompanied by stoppages in the physical! And of course there are the headaches, two points of pain that gather behind the temples and converge at the base of the skull. No cause for alarm, however. I shall not die at the Emma Lazarus for want of a laxative and an aspirin. Not for nothing does Benno Hamburger call our litde home the Enema Lazarus. This witticism is still making the rounds. No doubt about it, he is our specialist in coprological humor, a man of unbounded cloacal enthusiasms. But what sort of a way is this to begin, for heavens sake? Even to talk of such things! I am ashamed of myself. First I should tell you who I am. My name is Otto Korner. Dropping the umlaut over the o was my first concession to America. Yesterday, September 13, 1978, I celebrated my eighty-third birthday at the aforementioned Emma Lazarus, a retirement home on West End Avenue in Manhattan. Eventually you'll find me just south of Mineóla, Long Island, where I will be taking up permanent subterranean residence. Quite a few of my friends are already buried there. Only last week Adolphe Sinsheimer led the motorcade. He was to have been our Hamlet. (Yes, we have our little theatrical society