General

Given that I grew up at my family’s hotel in the Catskills and THE RABBI IN THE ATTIC was my first published book, it’s not surprising that most of the stories are set there. Woodstock really did happen a few miles from my house. After our hotel was sold, I worked summers at a crazy insurance company processing reports about the accidents that befell the elderly Jewish guests (and young campers) who vacationed in the region. The insurance office was straight out of a Philip Roth novel or a play by David Mamet, but I wanted to look at what it was like to be a young woman in such a crazy, sexy environment. (The experience must have been universal; one of the two stories set at the insurance company, “Neversink,” won a Pushcart Prize.)

As to the collection’s title story, I got the idea when I was sitting on my uncle’s porch, listening to the older men who ran our synagogue lament the fact that the overly zealous rabbi they had just fired refused to move out of the attic of the house that came with the job. Maybe, my uncle mused, if they hired a new rabbi, they could tell him that he could only live in the house if he managed to talk his predecessor out of the attic.

If you are a writer listening to such a conversation, you know you have the plot of the story. And if you hear that phrase, “the rabbi in the attic,” you know you have a title. More than that, I knew I had a theme. As someone who had grown up in a semi-Orthodox family but who had since broken away to become a liberal feminist, I knew that I was constantly trying to dislodge the Orthodox rabbi who kept nattering away in my own attic. I also knew that many of my friends had similarly strict, old-fashioned and judgmental rabbis, priests, ministers, upright Baptist aunts and grandmothers in their heads, criticizing their every move. (I am happy to say that some of my most enthusiastic fan mail has come from Unitarian ministers.)

Next year, I have a new novel coming out … THE BIBLE OF DIRTY JOKES, also set at a hotel in the Catskills (as well as a casino in Las Vegas). If you want to get a head start on that one, if you want to know what it was really like to grow up in the Borscht Belt, you can do worse than start with the stories in THE RABBI IN THE ATTIC.

Eileen Pollack

A Story of Heroic Achievement by Richard Rashke

On October 14, l943, six hundred Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with buried anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it to safety in the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the war.

In this fully updated edition of the book, Escape from Sobibor, Richard Rashke tells their stories, based on interviews with eighteen of the survivors living in the United States, Israel, Poland, and Brazil. He not only vividly describes the biggest prisoner escape of World War II, he also delves deep into the hearts and souls of those survivors.

Translated into eleven languages and made into a movie, Escape from Sobibor is a story of unimaginable cruelty and the power of unbridled hatred. But it is also a story of courage and a fierce desire to live and to tell the world what truly went on behind those barbed wire fences. The San Francisco Chronicle called it, “a memorable and moving saga, full of anguish, a reminder never to forget.” Given the widespread hatred and anti-Semitism sweeping across America today, Escape from Sobibor remains highly relevant.

Richard Rashke is also the award-winning author of The Killing of Karen Silkwood; Useful Enemies: America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals; Whistleblower’s Dilemma: Edward Snowden, Karen Silkwood and their Quest for the Truth; and the Sobibor-related play Dear Esther.

A Novel by Joseph Olshan

A young writer trying to finish his first novel has the whole world before him.  And this wider world is certainly a contrast to the finite world within his fiction.  When I was in my twenties and finishing my first novel, Clara’s Heart, I had no idea how the book would fare; I was, after many attempts, just trying to get the book right.  I had a larger-than-life character who seemed to know what she wanted and whose Jamaican patois became poetry whenever she spoke.  What Clara said was often as surprising to me as the writer as it became to the many readers who got to know her after the book was published.  Clara may have come from a different world and from a different culture, and yet she is probably my greatest fictional creation.  She somehow lives more vividly on the page than all the other characters I’ve created whose worlds are arguably much closer to my own.

And that was the magic that blessed me when I was writing Clara’s Heart. That was the inspiration that came from an almost mystical place.

When the book was finally published and sold to many foreign countries, I was surprised that my little story about a housekeeper who takes care of a young man whose parents are divorcing, could be related to by readers living in other languages and other cultures.  But then my Finnish publisher said something interesting to me. “Think of all the people who are hired to take care of children all over the world and who grow close to these children only to lose them when the children grow up. This is a story that anyone anywhere can relate to.”

Hollywood seemed to agree because a film, starring Whoopie Goldberg and Neil Patrick Harris was made of Clara’s Heart.