Book Club Discussion Thread : Anne Birstein

 

 

 

 

 

Birstein grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, down the street from the Actor’s Temple. She describes the congregation as filled with actors, comedians, Vaudevillians, radio stars and prizefighters. On Yom Kippur, she, her mother and three sisters (and the mother of Milton Berle) would look down from the “Ladies Balcony” to see Berle, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Red Buttons and once a young Frank Sinatra, who had been invited along.

Birstein graduated from Queens College (where her papers are housed) and studied at the Sorbonne on a Fulbright. She published her first novel, “Star of Glass,” at 23. She was a novelist of manners, with wry humor, who understood the many layers of human interactions; her memoirs were written with a novelist’s eye for character and complexity.

 

 

 

Biography Ann Birstein was born to immigrant Jewish parents in New York City on May 27th, 1927. Her father, Bernard Birstein was an orthodox rabbi who opened a small synagogue on West 47th Street in Manhattan to Broadway actors. The small synagogue was transformed into what became widely known as “The Actors Temple”, including Milton Berle and Jack Benny among its members. Growing up with the influence of The Actors Temple, Ann Birstein developed many personal contacts with notable Jewish celebrities such as Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker. After graduating from high school Birstein majored in English at Queens College, receiving a B.A., magna cum laude, in 1948. While in attendance at Queens College, Birstein was encouraged by one of her advisors to enter a literary competition sponsored by a publishing house. On the basis of a novel manuscript for which she had written one chapter per week, Birstein was awarded the Dodd Mead Intercollegiate Literary Fellowship. Included in this award was the publishing of her first novel, Star of Glass in 1950. After her graduation from Queens College, Birstein pursued graduate work at Kenyon School of English (1950), in Sorbonne, Paris (1951-1952). Following the release of her first novel, Birstein’s editor introduced her to New York writer and literary critic, Alfred Kazin, with whom she developed a romantic relationship. With this introduction, Birstein found herself thrust into the height of New York’s literary and intellectual circles with literary giants such as Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison as their most intimate friends. Birstein married Alfred Kazin in 1952. From the early 1950s through 1970s Birstein and Kazin took various residences in New York, New England and California to pursue Kazin’s university appointments. During this time Birstein was awarded MacDowell Colony fellowships to further work on her writing. Birstein divorced Kazin in 1982, and did not remarry. Birstein taught creative writing and lectured at Barnard, City College, Columbia University, Hofstra University, SUNY at Albany, The Writers Workshop at University of Iowa, The New School, Queens College and various schools and community centers in the US and abroad. Birstein’s honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Honorary Alumni Member Phi Beta Kappa, Fulbright Fellowship, and Queens College Scholar. Birstein is the author of nine books including seven works of fiction: Star of Glass (1950), The Troublemaker (1955), The Sweet Birds of Gorham (1966), Summer Situations (1972), Dickie’s List (1973), American Children (1980), The Rabbi on 47th Street (1982), The Last of the True Believers (1988) and What I Saw at the Fair (2003). Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New Yo

Birstein is a fine novelist (American Children)--so it's not surprising that she has turned her family history into a novel-like tale, one that bubbles with domestic furies reminiscent of I. B. Singer and ripe dialogue worthy of Odets. Her father, Rabbi Bernard Birstein, starts out as Beril Bernstein in pogrom-prone Slobodka, Poland, a rabbinical student who agrees to an arranged marriage with skinny, bespectacled Basha Friedlander. . . whose family will help finance their escape to the US. First stop (after Ellis Island): Atlanta--where, amid oppressive relatives and anti-Semitism, Beril has to make a living somehow (""Butcher? What was going on in this country, anyway?""). But then--after the Leo Frank lynching--Beril drags Basha and babies off to Chicago. . . and there Basha dies of the influenza. So the kids are deposited with slovenly cousin Lily (who silently yearns for Beril), while Beril becomes a sanitarium fund-raiser, ""a cuff-shooter, well-dressed and dapper,"" and, missing Lily's signals, instead acquires a new wife in Norfolk: blond, plump, born-hausfrau Clara. Finally, then, with family re-assembled, it's off to a rabbi position at last--in Canarsic, Brooklyn. But nervous, un-modern, non-English-speaking Clara is a hopeless rebbetzin; Beril's Canarsie days are numbered; he begins to have nightmares about ""toilet deodorants on commission""--the salesman's life. ""If only there were some shul where he could be independent. . . without the need of a helpmeet."" And there is such a shull! The rabbi-less West Side Hebrew Relief Association on 47th St. near Broadway--where Beril makes Jewish actors welcome (even if they're not orthodox), mounts great all-star benefit shows (after winning over the tough Sophie Tucker, reducing her to Yiddishe tears), and presides over a stormy family: Clara's jealousy of dead wife #1 and the daughters' (including Ann, Clara's own girl) unsuitable beaux. Roughly funny as well as nostalgically tender--a small delight. Pub Date: April 9th, 1982 ISBN: 0595089100 Publisher: Dial