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I was a writer before I knew the alphabet. Stories literally fed me: I often refused to eat, so my father would sit by my highchair inventing wild tales till I opened my mouth in excitement and he could pop a spoon in. Words fascinated me; when I heard a new one, I’d make up rhymes for it to keep it in my head.
Akron, Ohio wasn’t a friendly place for an intellectual Jewish girl in the 1950’s. I was alone a lot. I read constantly, and what I read often appalled me. I couldn’t fathom the brutality of the Holocaust or the racial oppression I saw everywhere. The people around me in the various enclaves of my middle-class life either didn’t care about these things, or were too hurt by them to talk about them. I grew up feeling like an outsider, but a lucky one with a comfortable home, Mozart and Verdi on my hi-fi, and a library of writers for company.
As soon as I finished high school I left Akron for what I hoped would be more congenial places. I studied at Cornell and Yale, traveled, and lived for long spells in Paris, Rome, Umbria, and New York. I got a doctorate so I could teach, and published a Princeton University Press book on William Blake’s poetry so I could continue teaching, first at NYU and then at Queens College of the City University of New York.
I loved my students and got more out of the classroom than they did, but academe was impinging so much on my writing that I took early retirement and moved into a two-¬hundred-¬year¬-old stone house in rural Normandy to clear my head. I lived there with my husband, physicist Stephen Orenstein, for nearly twenty years before we returned to New York. That Norman homestead gave me new perspectives, new material, and new clarity in the concerns that have always motivated me.
I’ve had fortunate collaborations. Richard Ryan’s limited edition Artist’s Book, XXII, matches fourteen of my poems with his hilarious and darkly erotic etchings, and Joel Mandelbaum’s opera to my libretto The Village gripped audiences so intensely at its New York premiere that a man stood up in the balcony and shouted “No!” when the hero died. In 2023, a production in Hamburg, Germany marked the opera’s European premiere. The libretto, based on my husband’s experiences as a hidden child in France during World War II, led to other projects on the Holocaust, including a novel on a different story and a screenplay which was optioned for film.
Mandelbaum’s song cycles to my poems have been performed on numerous stages, including Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. Others of my poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies, among them The Paris Review, Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Chelsea, Boulevard, Chicago Review, and The New York Times.
My novella The Names of the Dead won the 2021 Sandy Run Novella Award, and the novel developed from it, Desert’s End, is forthcoming from Hidden River Press. Call Them By Their Names, the book on the Holocaust in France I mentioned above, won the 2023 Hackney Literary Award for the Novel. My most recent novel, Fuller’s Return, is represented by Gail Hochman at Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. All these works are centered on strong female characters who insist on acting against oppression despite the constraints their often brutal societies place on them. The outrage I felt as a kid in Akron has stayed with me throughout my life.