Members of the Scribe
From Shtetl to Star: A Jewish Tradition of Changing Names
I changed my name from Hazak Brozgold to Royal Young when I was 20 years old. I was a drunk ...
Famous Roots: An Interview With My Babbi and Zayde
My maternal grandmother fought to escape her Lower East Side. My Babbi was born in 1932 and raised on Pitt ...
My Family’s Reaction to Fame Shark
“I sound like a cheap, mean kyke,” my father raged. “I sound like an idiot, a complete non-entity,” my mother ...
Living in Hebrew, Thinking in Aramaic, Writing in English
“Many artists are ‘underground’,” a writing instructor of mine once remarked, “but no one is more underground than writers.” To ...
On Writing a Novel About The Act of Writing a Novel
I’m sitting on the back porch of my temporary lodgings in Atlanta, while two spiders go at it, the smaller ...
I Was Born a Rambling Man
When someone asks me where I’m from, I never hesitate to say that I’m from New York City. Then, a ...
Writing What You’ve Never Seen: Janice Weizman and Historical Fiction
All fiction writers have a streak of audacity. To make up something and then ask readers to suspend their disbelief ...
What We Talk About When We Talk About Book Dedications
I knew I was going to dedicate my first novel, Antonia Lively Breaks The Silence , to my maternal grandparents ...
Making the Invisible Visible: The Bildungsroman and the Jewish Woman
A young man leaves his home and sets out on a journey. He is impressionable, sensitive, and inexperienced in the ...
Introducing Inspector Avraham Avraham
I can honestly say I was concerned by this “Mystery of the Hebrew Detective,” mainly before and after writing the ...
Can a Policeman be an Israeli Hero?
I’ll try to summarize the new problem of writing a detective in Hebrew in a simple way. The biography of ...
When 50 Happens to Good People: Part Two
Ok, so I hadn’t done time in prison, I’d just spent one day there. I’d just covered what was believed ...