Jacob Jaffe

Jacob Jaffe was born in 1930, nine months after stock market crash, at Bronx Hospital. He was the youngest son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had escaped pogroms, World War I and the Russian Revolution to settle in the Bronx, New York. His father was a house painter whose economic improvement was marked by the family's moving from apartments in the South and East Bronx to within sight of Grand Concourse. Jaffe attended neighborhood public schools and graduated from Bronx High School of Science, which at the time was not a Specialized High School. He left the Bronx to attend several colleges, such as City College of New York (CCNY), , and then Teacher's College at Columbia University. There, he got his doctorate in psychology.
Dr. Jaffe became a psychologist and taught at Columbia and the City Universities. His research was published in national psychology journals and he has made numerous presentations at conferences. He still has a psychotherapy practice in The Bronx. While working with today's immigrants, he has been writing memoir fiction about his parents' immigrant generation, which is practically gone, and his brother's World War Two generation, which is fast dwindling.
Jacob Jaffe published two books. His first novel, Land of Dreams, focusses on the life of a ten-year old boy living in the Bronx, while America's getting out. of the Depression and Euprope is heading into war. His second novel, Hobgoblins, is a psychological thriller about an attempt to overthrow the United States government and establish a dictatorship. He is also the author of six published short stories. He divides his time between his psychotherapy practice and writing about a past generation that, except for ethnicity and race, confronted problems similar to those of today's immigrants; the saga going back to the time when our earliest Homo Sapiens first ventured from their savanna homeland. The author still finds time to bicycle in the Bronx and spend time with his wife, grown children, daughter-in-law and grandson.
Land of Dreams
His first novel is Land of Dreams. Jacob Jaffe's novel focusses on a ten-year-old boy during 1938-1939, the year America was struggling out of the Depression and Europe was staggering into war. The adult narrator, Al, relives that year as the ten-year old boy. All the characters in this novel are based solely on Jacob Jaffe and people he knew while growing up.
When the narrator was ten, he was witness to the struggles of his immigrant family: his father risks his life to oust the gangsters from the painters union, while his mother tries to smuggle her sister's family out of Soviet Russia. Al resonates to his grandfather's Orthodoxy and is challenged by his older brother's scientism. Al (also known as Yakla) has other conflicts as well: being accepted by his Irish-American fourth grade teacher, dealing with the class bully who dislikes him because he's fat and Jewish, escaping his over-protective mother and trying to make sense of his family and the world.
Al later meets an African-American boy who enters his class, whose grandfather is an Apache survivor of his tribe's 1890 Florida imprisonment. Besides the serious themes seen in the book, we witness the mishaps at the Christmas and Chanukah plays and the Bronx Bombers winning the 1938 World Series. In his struggles, Al 'enlists' the help of the 1930s comic strip and radio heroes including Superman, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. He also finds help from people from The Bible (Noah, Abraham, Moses and God). Al finds that these help him confront formidable enemies like the school bully, the immigration police, Adolf Hitler, Death . . . and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Hobgoblins
His second book is Hobgoblins. Frustrated by political obstacles to their goals of economic world domination, a group of unscrupulous American industrial tycoons secretly finance a new political party, the American Freedom Party (AFP).
The conspirators plan to use the AFP to subvert the Constitution and further their monopolistic national and global agendas. What they fail to realize is that John Gerard, their charismatic presidential candidate, plans to double-cross them and, like Hitler, become a dictator. These conspiratorial financiers create international economic, terrorist and political crises that leave the Republican and Democratic parties hopelessly divided and ineffectual. With behind-the-scenes manipulations, AFP enables their candidate to resolve these crises and gain the support of the frightened citizens of the United States.
Only three people can thwart these plots: Dr. Ritter, a psychologist who once treated the future presidential candidate, Solomon Weissman, a muckraking journalist and a third person whose identity is revealed in the climax. During hypnosis sessions, the psychopathic Gerard unknowingly reveals his plans to Dr. Ritter. Meanwhile, Weissman penetrates the financiers' New Millennium Consortium and learns of their plans. In his climb to power, Gerard arranges for the disappearance of his opponents and those familiar with his past. But the one adversary he doesn't anticipate is the only man who knows the secret behind the hobgoblin nightmares that haunt both Dr. Ritter and himself.

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