BROOKLYN is a place of many lands and a boy may have many childhoods there. So begins the tale of Albert Rothman, writer, poet, chemical engineer and child of the Great Depression. Albert spent his formative years in several of Brooklyns neighborhoods, playing the traditional street games that city boys have invented over the years, discovering the pleasure of books and the public library, riding his bicycle all over Brooklyn and learning the freedom and joy of outdoor spaces from the rooftop of his apartment house. Yet, beset by illness, loneliness, bullies, anti-Semitism, and his own confusion, he felt like a stranger in every neighborhood and school. In A Brooklyn Odyssey, Rothman weaves a multi-colored tapestry of life in a time and place unknown to many of us, the life of a small boy in an extended family in a large city, decades ago. Yet the story is familiar to us all in his recounting of the confusing and mysterious world that is childhood.