THE LAST FINE TIME by Verlyn...

THE LAST FINE TIME by Verlyn Klinkenborg (Vintage: $10). Nineteen forty-seven was a fine time to be in Buffalo, N. Y., especially at George and Eddie’s, a neighborhood restaurant-tavern at 722 Sycamore St. Handsome and charming Eddie Wenzek presided at the bar, pouring drinks for the Polish-American clientele and keeping the jukebox stocked with the latest swing music. Using this halcyon moment, lit by the receding glow of victory, as a starting point, Klinkenborg traces the origins of George and Eddie’s and of the city. He follows the wave of Polish immigrants who came to America at the turn of the 19th Century (when there was no independent Poland--just the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and found work in Buffalo’s factories and railyards. During Prohibition, Eddie’s father made the bar a comfortable watering hole for local laborers who chose to ignore the Noble Experiment. Eddie turned it into a more sophisticated place--exciting, yet respectable--where a man could take his wife or girlfriend. For a time, the bar and the Wenzeks prospered, but “The Last Fine Time” is the story of a dream that failed. The influx of blacks during and after the war led the newly middle-class whites to abandon the city for the suburbs: Sycamore Street and its neighborhood deteriorated until the bar was reduced to a deserted shelter for junkies and runaways. Klinkenborg chronicles the rise and decline of the city in moody, reflective prose that seems to shine with an inner light.