David Black

David Black (born 1945 in Boston and resides there and in New York) [An American journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and television producer. After graduating from Amherst College, he worked as an investigative journalist, writing over 150 articles for major publications like The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s. He has published 11 books including the true-crime book Murder at the Met, a multi-generational Jewish crime novel An Impossible Life, and the conspiracy thriller The Extinction Event. He also enjoyed success as a television writer and producer, working on well-known series such as Law & Order, Miami Vice, Hill Street Blues, CSI-Miami, and Blue Bloods. He also wrote and produced the 1992 made-for-TV movie, Legacy of Lies. See the entry on this movie in the companion Filmography.

Black, David, (An Impossible Life: A Bobeh Myseh [hc, Moyer Bell Ltd., 1998]) 978-1559212229 [The book serves as a multi-generational, magical realist epic that blends gritty gangster drama with Jewish folklore, family mythologies, and dark Borscht Belt comedy. It tracks backward from contemporary American life to the 19th-century European shtetls, using the specter of Jewish gangsters as a primary structural element. The protagonist, Leo Polishook, is attempting to understand the root of his mother’s severe mental illness and dementia. To make sense of his family’s chaotic reality—symbolized by his mother sifting his deceased father’s ashes through his sister’s marijuana strainer to “save his gold”—Leo reaches back through time to investigate seven generations of family history. Throughout the entire book, Leo carries on a witty, biting, and deeply moving conversation with the ghost of his deceased father. Rather than a somber haunting, their ongoing dialogue plays out like a Woody Allen or Borscht Belt comedy routine, acting as the emotional anchor of the book. As Leo sifts through his ancestry, the book moves backward through centuries of Jewish history, tracking three distinct eras:

The American Immigrant Era: Leo recalls the life of his kindly but fiercely vicious grandfather, an infamous Depression-era mobster known as “the Pasha of Allen Street.” This grandfather embodies the classic “Jewish gangster” archetype, casually gossiping with God over glasses of Slivovitz at a local café while organizing local crime rackets.

The 19th-Century Shtetls: The narrative shifts back to Eastern Europe, focusing on the hardships, pogroms, and everyday survivals of his ancestors. This includes mythologized ancestral feats, such as a great-grandfather who famously strangled a wolf barehanded because the beast was blocking his path to the outhouse.

The 18th-Century Mysticism: The deepest layer of the book dives into Eastern European Jewish mysticism, featuring haunting tales of demonic possession, transmigrating souls (dybbuks), and wonder rabbis.

The novel explores how the historical trauma of the Jewish diaspora—from European pogroms to the gritty underworld of New York immigrant survival—manifests as psychological burdens in modern descendants. Black highlights how families use exaggerated folklore and humor to shield themselves from tragic realities. As Leo’s father’s ghost notes, “The living are surrounded by ghosts,” illustrating that ancestry is never truly dead. [Google/AI]