PRO CONNECT
MARSHA LEE BERKMAN
Although I write from my own background and interests, writing in a very real sense opens me to a universal world that connects me to other people no matter how dissimilar they are to my own experience, both to the living and to those who no longer walk the earth. Thus, my stories are joined to the commonality of the human condition throughout the ages, to ancient myths and traditions reinterpreted for our time, and to the unifying denominator of joys, fears and sorrows of anyone who has ever been alive. I consider it a singular privilege and spiritually transforming to give voice to worlds that have been invisible and to people who would have been mute except for the power I have given them. I am particularly interested in women’s stories that have been silenced and grateful that I had one of the finest writers of the American short story, Gina Berriault, as one of my teachers. In all of my work, I search for the telling detail, the veracity that lies hidden beneath the surface clamor and the thoughtful revelation of what it means to be human in all of its complexity.
My prize-winning fiction has been published in literary magazines and journals, university presses and anthologies, including The Schocken Book of Contemporary Jewish Fiction, Writing Our Way Home, Mothers, Shaking Eve’s Tree, Feldspar Prize Stories 2, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Lilith, Chicago Quarterly Review, REAL: Regarding Arts and Letters and numerous other publications. I am coeditor of the acclaimed anthology Here I Am: Contemporary Jewish Stories From Around The World, published by The Jewish Publication Society and awarded the prestigious PEN/ Oakland Josephine Miles Award for outstanding literary achievement. I teach writing and memoir workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live and work.
I received my Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University and hold graduate degrees in both English Literature and Creative Writing from Sonoma State University and San Franciso State University and a Master of Science and Doctor of Science in Jewish Studies from Spertus Institute in Chicago. The subject of my doctoral dissertation is a study of the historical forces that have shaped Jewish life and the power of memory in the collective consciousness and literature of the Jewish people. I believe that writing is a way to order the apparent chaos of the world and to find understanding and meaning in the universe and in one’s life. I accept it as an act of prayer, an attempt to reveal the sacred spaces between the words.
“Luminous tales of exile and loss that bequeath new life.”
– Kirkus Reviews
ADDITIONAL WORKS AVAILABLE
HERE I AM: CONTEMPORARY JEWISH STORIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD
Awarded the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award “to promote works of excellence by writers of all cultural and racial backgrounds…and to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community.”
“A premier collection of contemporary Jewish short stories from around the world, spanning six continents and twenty-four countries.” Published by The Jewish Publication Society and available from The University of Nebraska Press, Here I Am features stories by Cynthia Ozick, Allegra Goodman, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Nadine Gordimer, Andre Aciman, A.B. Yehoshua and many other notable authors.
“Here I Am is remarkable for the breadth and variety of places and writers represented, with some surprising choices on both scores. It conveys a vividly fresh sense of cultural meaning of diaspora and should be of interest to a wide spectrum of readers.”
Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley.
ISBN: 0-8276-0654-0
KREUZLINGEN: THE SECRET LIFE OF FREUD'S ANNA O., FROM THE GIRLS OF JERUSALEM
Kreuzlingen: The Secret Life of Freud’s Anna O. is the extraordinary narrative of Bertha Pappenheim, a young Viennese woman who entered Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland in July, 1882 after a severe mental and physical breakdown while she was caring for her father who was dying. Diagnosed with a condition known as hysteria and identified only as Anna O. in the book Sigmund Freud wrote with her doctor, Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, her real name and history were unknown until l953.
When I learned of Anna O’s true identity I was immediately drawn to the story and sought the best way to tell it, as well as discovering Bertha Pappenheim’s relationship to the beginning of psychoanalysis. I finally settled on the epistolary method not only due to the time period but also because it evoked an intimacy that added to the emotional depth of the story. Further, the letters that were written back and forth gave different vantage points to widely diverse people and gave them a part in relating the narrative. This allowed the reader to view a panorama of the time and its social and political problems, as well as revealing a first-hand perspective of major personages of the day, such as Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber. However, my primary purpose in writing Bertha’s story was to give a more honest dimension to the story of Anna O. than the one that appears in Studies on Hysteria and a human face to Bertha Pappenheim during the little-known period of her time in the sanatorium and her recovery and rise as a leader of German Jewry when Hitler came to power. Kreuzlingen is a portrait of an unforgettable woman, the beginning of psychoanalysis and a vanished era by an award-winning writer.
THE PERSISTENCE OF DESIRE
The Persistence of Desire, a novel, consists of two mythic stories: the drive for success and the pursuit of the American Dream at a critical point in American history, as told through the chronicle of the Levine family, narrated by the younger daughter Pru. Intelligent and unsentimental, Pru grows to maturity under the shadow of World War II, her parents’ turbulent marriage, and the restless wandering that sends her family traveling across the country. Her mother, Leilah, is a passionate and ambitious woman who brilliantly attempts to build a presence outside the home and to have a career, while her father Maurie, pursues his own dream of success by selling a new invention, television, that he claims will transform American life. Joan, Pru’s beautiful older sister, hopes that she will never be ordinary, and tragically, receives her wish. In an ironic parallel to the story of the Levine’s assimilation into American society, and one that is not lost on Pru, at the same time, all over Europe, her cousins, aunts, and uncles are being brutally hunted down and murdered.
THE WOMEN WHO LOVED DAVID: A NOVEL (IN-PROGRESS)
Many books have been written about the biblical King David, but very little regarding the women in David’s complicated life who were integral to his rise to power and the formation of his character. Poet, musician, warrior and visionary, lover of God and women, this work of literary fiction gives voice to four of these women: Michal, David’s youthful bride, daughter of the first king of Israel, Saul, who becomes caught in the battle for the throne between her father and her husband; Abigail, whose own spiritual yearning matched David’s longing for his Creator; Bathsheba, his greatest love, with whom he sins, a misstep that nearly causes his downfall and Abishag who comforts him during his decline. The Women Who Loved David brings these strong women to life as they emerge from the margins of history to tell their stories against one of the most important periods in human history.
Sign in with Google