10th Annual Fiction Panel Luncheon
Friday, November 4, 12pm, JCC Auditorium, $15 Members / $18 Non-Members
(Kensington; August 2011)
Benji Steiner is skeptical that someone can be bashert, the person you are fated to meet. Then he befriends an elderly rabbi who has no such doubts. The rabbi’s wife, Sophie, was his bashert and, now that she’s gone, he is left to grapple with grief and loneliness. This evolving friendship baffles everyone but helps Benji discover something he didn’t know he’d lost. Yet the test of friendship, and of both men’s faith, lies in the difficult truths they share.
Rich Boy
(Twelve; July 2011)
Robert Vishniak, a handsome and clever boy from a working-class Jewish neighborhood in 1950s Philadelphia, glides into the cloistered universities of New England, where he meets scions of unimaginable wealth and influence. The doors that open there lead Robert to the highest circles of Manhattan society and he seems to have it all until a chance encounter threatens to unravel his carefully constructed identity. This is a debut novel by Pomerantz, whose story “Shoes” was nationally broadcast on NPR’s Selected Shorts.
A Stranger on the Planet
(Soho Press; January 2011)
In this first novel, portions of which were published in The New Yorker, 12-year-old Seth is coming of age, coping in the Summer of ’69 with an unstable mother, her new husband, two siblings and a distant father who lives a rich life with a new wife. He is dying to escape. Instead, he becomes the keeper of his family’s memories and secrets, and his mother becomes his muse. The author is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College.
Moderated by Ellen Comisar; Generously underwritten by Debby and Elliott Landsman
