Posted on January 31, 2021
I’ve reconnected with friends from the past during the pandemic, mostly over Zoom, sometimes over the phone. It’s been a wonderful experience, but I have to confess to one significant regret. I wished I’d kept up with these people years ago, as they are a remarkably talented group of individuals, not simply measured in terms of their achievements, but rather as perceptive, candid, modest, etc. They are mensches, and I would’ve been better off had I been in contact with them years earlier. The good news is that the rejuvenated connections appear here to stay.
What I wanted to share is something that’s been brought up by every one of them. The question is sometimes posed differently, but it can be paraphrased as follows:
What was it that caused you to wake up one day and say enough with running biotech firms and now it’s time to try to write fiction seriously? Literary fiction, no less.
The short answer was that the clock was ticking, and if I kept on postponing this inkling that it was something I should try, I’d be in the position at a later date expressing my regrets at the what could have beens.
I was struck by the observation that not much of today’s literary fiction deals with what I call the American Jewish experience. There’s much being written about the Holocaust, and Israeli fiction written in Hebrew has become extraordinarily good, but less and less fiction is now written about what it’s like to be (and have been) a Jew in America. There are many good books that include American Jewish characters and scenes, but not as much as in prior times when the raison d’être of a particular novel was centered on how Jews are interwoven into the fabric of America. I wanted to enter this arena to see if I could make a contribution.
While writing about the American Jewish experience is specific, my books contain stories and themes that relate to the immigrant experience in general, so like the old TV commercial that says “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s real Jewish Rye,” you don’t have to be Jewish to identify with the immigrant experience of many groups. Given that my first book—My Mother’s Son—takes place mostly in Boston in the 1950s, it’s filled with Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics, all scrambling to rise through the muck to be accepted simply as Americans.
Coming in May is Jacobo’s Rainbow, a historical literary novel set primarily in New Mexico in the 1960s during the convulsive period of the student protest movements and the Vietnam War. It focuses on the issue of being an outsider—the ‘other’— an altogether common circumstance that resonates with readers in today’s America. Written from a Jewish perspective, it speaks to universal truths that affect us all.
In the pipeline is A Bronx Cheer, an historical literary novel set in the 1950s in The Bronx and Upper Manhattan. It’s a modern retelling of the Jacob and Esau story from Genesis.
Anyone interested in finding out more about these novels can visit www.DavidHirshberg.com. Yes, I write under a pseudonym. That way, I keep my biotech life separate from my writing endeavors.