Sam Sussman is the author of the novel Boy From the North Country. He graduated with a B.A. from Swarthmore and M.Phil from Oxford and has lived in Berlin and Jerusalem. Sam has won the BAFTA New Writing Award, published in Harper’s Magazine, and participated in the PEN World Voices Festival. He has taught writing seminars in India, South America, and England. Sam lives in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan and his native Hudson Valley.
http://www.samevansussman.org/
LABA Project:
‘The Brothers Bernstein’ tells the story of three brothers estranged by conflicting Jewish identities. Born into middle class freedom in the postwar years, each brother seeks out a distinctly Jewish life: as a novelist, a civil rights lawyer, and an Hasidic rabbi. From New York to Hebron, ‘The Brothers Bernstein’ is at once a chronicle of conflicting Jewish relationships to religiosity, intermarriage, and Israel-Palestine, and a story of the ineffable conflicts that endure within families.
What is a surprising choice you made this year?
I spent the peak of Covid in Goshen, NY, where I grew up, with my partner and our dog. It was strange to be returned to my hometown with all the apparatus of adult life, but also wonderful and freeing. We went hiking, swimming, and blueberry picking. We had more time with each other than busy city lives allow. It was an unexpected decision, but one of the best I’ve made.