Interview With Award-Winning Jewish Literary Author Howard Langer

  

 

1.       Howard, what is your recently published book, The Last Dekrepitzer, about? The book is about a man found fiddling blues and Hasidic melodies, niggunim, in a New York subway station in the early 1960s. A young man begins a discussion with him. The man speaks Black English. He is the Dekrepitzer Rebbe, the sole member of his sect to survive the Holocaust, living anonymously. The book describes his odyssey—from pre-war Poland, through the war, to rural Mississippi to the streets of Manhattan—his marriage to a Black woman, and his confrontation with God, whose existence he never doubts, over what He did to the Jews. It recounts the journey of a man who has lost everything—his family, his people, his mission, and his faith in his tradition—who lost one world and is lost in another. He is the spiritual leader of a community that has been wiped out, who fashions an identity from the shards of his broken life.

 

2.       What inspired you to write it?  I began writing The Last Dekrepitzer when I was seventy. A lifetime of disparate anxieties were roiling inside me: issues of faith, purpose, the struggle with my Judaism, mortality, God, America, the treatment of Blacks, the tensions between Blacks and Jews and, of course, the Holocaust magnifying them all. With age came a certain frankness of observation and a frightening clarity of mortality. So, I began with the story of this rabbi cut-off from his lost community. A man brought up with a mission and destiny that could no longer be fulfilled. Not just a foreign Jew alone in New York but one often mistaken for a Black because of his speech. He carries a relic—the ancestral fiddle of his forebears and their niggunim, their tunes, that he plays on it. I had no idea when I began writing how this man who shared my core angsts, but also bore vastly greater ones, ended up busking a New York subway station, but was driven to learn his story. I knew that story would express what was roiling within me. Each day I was drawn more and more deeply into the life of this man I was discovering, I guess creating.

 

3.       Your story explores how one loses their faith but regains it in the aftermath of the Holocaust, but you convey it in an unusual way.  Why is a Hasidic rabbi posing as a Black street-fiddler in the South? He isn’t posing. He is saved by Black soldiers and, believing his entire Jewish world has been destroyed, he finds comfort in his years alone among the rural Blacks in Mississippi. His introduction to America is entirely to that rural Black America. He learns their English, their music and even preaches in their church. As a device, speaking Black English and playing Black music underscores his isolation. In Mississippi he is a white Jewish rabbi among Blacks. In New York he seems much a Black man among whites. His Black wife mirrors his experience becoming a Jew among Blacks and, in the North, as a Black woman among Jews.

 

4.       What is the spiritual journey of your main character like, given he lost all belief and hope during what he suffered and witnessed during World War II? The protagonist, Shmuel Meir, is brought up to be the “Rebbe,” the leader of his sect—an intermediary between his followers and God. He can never escape that role, even though all of his sect has been killed. He never loses his belief that there is a God—indeed he has a revelation leaving no doubt. He believes that God has broken His covenant so he has lost faith in the covenant between God and His people—all that he was brought up to believe. His fiddling is a constant confrontation of God with what He has done. In a sense, it is because he has such a firm belief in what Divine justice is supposed to be, that he confronts God with his wordless fiddling which he describes as his reproach to God.

 

5.       How did anyone find the will to live in the shadows of the Holocaust’s blinding destruction? A question I find difficult to answer. Many did not. My family had been in America for generations before the Holocaust and my father had been in the Navy during the war. But I have friends who are the offspring of second families of their parents who lost their wives and children in the Holocaust. For many, they were just human beings and had to go on, just had to go on, and found different pathways. Some were irreligious before the war and became religious, others were religious and lost their faith and the most interesting may be those who were religious before the war and maintained their religion after. These different people are explored in the book.

 

6.       What role does music play in your inventive story? For the protagonist there are no longer true words of prayer to God only the pure emotion of his music which he plays religiously three times a day at the times of Jewish prayer. But in the course of the book, he encounters different people with different music. The African Americans in their rural church for whom music is an essential part of their service;  a sixteen year old Jerry Lee Lewis, a devout fundamentalist, who has just been expelled from a seminary for playing “My God is Real” boogie woogie style; the Reverend Gary Davis who plays on the streets of New York to bring people to Jesus; and the character Sonneblick whom he meets in Washington Square who attempts to restore words to the Dekrepitzer’s niggunim. All these different musics reflect on each other.

 

7.       The rabbi takes a black woman for his wife. Interracial marriage in the 1960s South was not exactly embraced by either race. Have we come a long way since then? Yes, we have. It was illegal then in many states. It certainly isn’t now. People don’t turn their heads today to look at an interracial couple as they would have in 1950s New York. We could certainly go a great deal further. The child of that couple will face a very different life if he or she is born with black or white skin. But look, just a few weeks ago Senator Booker married a very Black Jewish woman, the child of an interracial marriage. I don’t think anybody winced or would have winced had she been white skinned. Nor do I think a Black person in a synagogue would be quite the anomaly that person would have been in the 1950s. Curiously, I read that in the early 1930s the first valedictorian of the synagogue school of the congregation the wife visits in my book, which was then located in Harlem, was Black.

 

8.       Your book is the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award but it seems like it has a wider appeal beyond Jewish readers.  You believe your book is not just for Jews, but for the Black community as well. Why? The book clearly has broader appeal. It was a finalist for the Athenaeum Award, which has nothing particularly Jewish about it. My goal was, in part, to explain each society to the other. Also, the Black community has deeply religious elements to whom the protagonist’s struggle with God would resonate. I don’t think Blacks realize the fundamental aspect that slavery plays in Judaism, that the people were basically born in slavery and the nation began upon leaving Egypt. Conversely, I don’t think Jews understand what slavery really is. I certainly didn’t until I read certain Black slave narratives and Frederick Douglas. So there is seder in the book in which the Rebbe leads the meal with a table made up entirely of children and grandchildren of slaves. Similarly, I know from presentations I’ve given to Black groups that they neither have a real understanding of the Holocaust or that before the Holocaust Jews in Europe experienced very similar oppression to that which Blacks experience in America.

 

9.       The last remaining survivors of the Holocaust are dwindling in number by the day. How important is it, especially in these times, to advocate against anti-Semitism and to find a way to heal the wounds of hate and prejudice? I don’t know. I grew up in an era in America which was probably the most secure for Jews in their entire history. Then suddenly the last few years….It has shaken me. The entire nature of our society and what is considered acceptable discourse has been terribly compromised. Things that were unacceptable—antisemitism being just one of them—are now bruited everywhere. I’ve not wanted to accept what people tell me, that my book couldn’t be published because of attitudes in the publishing industry having nothing to do with the merits of my book…It won a major award and was a finalist for another and yet nobody would publish it…agents were so sure of that they wouldn’t represent me. I’ve heard it repeated a thousand times—it begins with antisemitism—and if that’s true, everyone best be concerned with what’s next.

 

10.   The main character is in a perpetual argument with God while trying to find a way back to believe again. He is also feeling like he has no home, torn between an unsafe Mississippi and Jim Crow Laws and a Harlem that is conditional and a reminder of his displacement in the world. How does one find their place in a world that seems upside down to them? Without sounding corny, I believe it is all between individuals. The main character finds love in his wife and then in his child. He discovers two dear friends. I have done much pro bono law work among African Americans and, while we speak so often about the “crisis of the Black family,” I see often wonderful large families, even if broken, and tight communities under very adverse conditions. We can’t let God, or concepts of God, ruin the limited lives we’ve been granted.

 

11.   How does the reader grapple with a story where its main character grapples with how evil had become so ordinary? Actually, people tell me that there are no evil characters in my book. Everybody is “good.” But,, of course the big evils are always lurking—the Holocaust, the Klan, the quiet prejudice. The reader sees all these good folks making their way through it. It’s an old story. A great teacher once asked a Shakespeare class I was in to summarize in a sentence the moral of King Lear.  “Virtue is its own reward,” he said. We were astonished. He went on. “The good daughter, Cordelia, …the virtuous characters get done in. They have solace in their virtue when they are alive. The evil daughters and son, Goneril, Regan, Edmund, no matter what they achieve, they’re never happy, never have enough.”

 

12.   Where are Black and Jewish relationships and cultures today, compared to the Civil Rights Movement era of the 1960s? Now it is terrible. My uncle, who was a prominent rabbi, marched with Dr. King. Certainly, it was much better in the fifties and early sixties. Black power, the Panthers, Black Muslims, were overtly antisemitic and it deeply affected the subsequent generations. They gave license to voice antisemitism. There are some reasons for that antisemitism. But one could say the same thing for other racisms. Because some landlord exploited Black tenants is no more reason to hate the Jewish public interest lawyer fighting him than there is to hate a Black schoolteacher because a Black thief may have held up your aunt. It’s very bad now. Yet Jews were with the Blacks in the fifties and sixties. Jack Greenberg was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The entire strategy followed to reach Brown v. Board of Education was devised by a forgotten Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, Nathan R, Margold. On Memorial Day weekend two years ago, someone stuck a Black Lives Matter lawn sign in which they’d spray painted “Jews.” I wrote an article puzzling what to make of it.

 

About The Author: The Last Dekrepitzer is Howard Langer's debut novel and his first work of fiction in 50 years and it received the National Jewish Book Award.  His book was featured in numerous publications, including: Times of Israel, Hadassah Magazine, Moments, Kirkus Reviews, The Philadelphia Bar Reporter, and The Reporter. He was also awarded, a half-century ago, the Theodore Goodman Award for Short Fiction  

 

He teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania and practices law in Philadelphia. He founded Langer Grogan & Diver, PC a quarter-century ago. He has obtained several of the largest recoveries for consumers (several were over $100 million) in class actions brought under both the antitrust laws and the RICO statute. He is the author of a treatise on antitrust law, The Competition Law of the United States, which has gone through four editions. Langer, who has spoken about his book at numerous Jewish Community Centers, synagogues, the Jewish Theological Seminary, African American seniors Groups. a federal judges’ book group, and University of Pennsylvania, resides in Philadelphia.  For more information, please consult: www.howardlanger.com and https://www.facebook.com/howardlangerauthor/.

 

 

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For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

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