On Friday night, we will be welcoming · Amy Gottlieb and Rachel Seiffert two incredible authors. They will be speaking downstairs in the Orthodox Synagogue to the entire community, following both services at around 6:45pm - 7:15pm.

Amy will be talking about how she came to write The Beautiful Possible and why she explored motifs of faith, doubt, and hasidut through the lens of literary fiction. 

The Beautiful Possible was a runner-up for the 2016 Edward Lewis Wallant Award and a 2016 National Jewish Book Award Finalist. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Other Voices, Lilith, Puerto del Sol, Zeek, Storyscape, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and elsewhere. She has received a Literary Fellowship and Residency from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and an Arts Fellowship from the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education. Amy is a graduate of Clark University and the University of Chicago. She lives with her family on the edge of the Hudson River in New York City.

Rachel will be speaking on about fiction's role in remembering the Holocaust - for writers and for readers.  As a writer, she take real events/people - sometimes from her own family, sometimes from research - and imagines scenarios for them to inhabit.  Weaving this into stories is her way of working out how and why such events could come about - sometimes the historical record has too many gaps to do this (in part, and very sadly, because all too few survived to create it).  Through caring about the characters and their fates, she want my readers to experience a similar process.

Rachel is one of Virago’s most critically acclaimed contemporary novelists. Her first book, The Dark Room, (2001) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and made into the feature film Lore. In 2003, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2011 she received the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Field Study, her collection of short stories published in 2004, received an award from PEN International. Her second novel, Afterwards (2007) and third novel The Walk Home (2014), were both longlisted for the Orange/Baileys Prize.  Her books have been published in eighteen languages.