
In 2015, Miriam Ruth Black saw a news report about Syrian refugees trudging across Europe, seeking safety. She noticed a little boy among the crowd.
“I thought, ‘There’s my dad,’” says Black, whose father was orphaned in a Ukrainian pogrom at age 4. “I saw my father as he must have been a hundred years before, a hungry, frightened, and despairing child.”
That moment was the first spark for her historical novel, “Shayna,” which won the National Jewish Book Award in 2022. Black will discuss “Shayna” on Thursday, March 13 as one of four featured authors at the Tucson Chapter/Brandeis National Committee’s Book & Author luncheon.
A Pima Community College workshop prompt, “Write about something destroyed in childhood and redeemed later in life,” provided further inspiration. Black wrote a short story about a 17-year-old girl who survives a pogrom, which she later expanded into “Shayna.”
“Only after I finished,” she says, “did I realize I’d been attempting to give my father a better life, to replace, if only through fiction, the family he had lost.”
Black’s father didn’t talk much about his past, but she gleaned a precious few details to incorporate into her novel. The rest comes from her imagination, fed by growing up in “a very Jewish, Yiddish-speaking” neighborhood in Minnesota, which she likens to a shtetl, and through meticulous research, such as the sound of a steamship horn, which she was delighted to find on the internet.
“Shayna” begins in Obodivka, the Ukrainian shtetl where Black’s father was born. After surviving a pogrom in May 1919, Shayna rescues her four-year-old nephew and with her fiancé and his mother, braves a perilous trek across Europe, on their way to the “goldene medine,” the golden land of the United States.
The Jewish Book Council says “Shayna” is “both heart-wrenching and eye-opening … A wonderful, compelling, and sincere story of loss and discovery.”
Throughout Black’s life as a teacher, workshop facilitator, lecturer, and therapist, she’s always written short stories and sketches. She published her first book, a contemporary novel called “Turtle Season,” in 2012.
She is one of those writers who is sometimes surprised by her characters’ actions. For “Turtle Season,” she planned a scene between a mother and daughter in the restaurant at the top of Seattle’s Space Needle. But when she wrote it, as the elevator doors open to reveal the restaurant, the daughter says, “Ugh, it’s so cloudy, let’s get out of here,” and the pair go back down in the elevator.
Black will be joined at the Brandeis event by three acclaimed writers whose works run the gamut from memoir to true crime to fiction.
Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez is a local star. When her parents were forced to return to Mexico when she was 15, she remained in Tucson, graduating from Flowing Wells High School, and ultimately graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. Her memoir, “My Side of the River,” has been praised as a New York Times Editor’s Pick and a People Magazine Best Book to Read.
Lisa Belkin is an award-winning journalist who spent over 20 years at the New York Times. She also worked at HuffPost and Yahoo News and regularly contributed to Public Radio’s “The Takeaway” and NBC’s “Today Show.” Her four books include “Show Me a Hero,” which became an HBO series. The latest, “Genealogy of a Murder,” is a true, multigenerational tale of three families whose paths collide one fateful summer night in 1960 with the murder of a police officer.
Kirsten Miller is a groundbreaking feminist author in YA literature. Her first adult novel, “The Change,” was a Good Morning America Book Club pick. Her latest novel is “Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books,” a satire that takes on some of the most controversial issues of our day. People Magazine calls it “sneakily smart.”
The Book and Author lunch will be held at Skyline Country Club. Seating options begin at $110; a Zoom option is $50. Proceeds will support a Brandeis University research program seeking causes of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, ALS, and Alzheimer’s.
To reserve a place, email booknauthor@gmail.com.