Author Shira Dicker will discuss her book “Lolita at Leonard’s of Great Neck and Other Stories from the Before Times” at Temple Beth-El of Great Neck on Sunday, Dec. 7, at 10 a.m.
In conversation with congregant Len Schiff, a high school English teacher and musical theater lyricist, the North Shore Hebrew Academy graduate will guide attendees through an intimate, uniquely Jewish journey spanning 1974 through the early 2000s, a representative of the temple said. The characters in Dicker’s stories navigate identity, independence, ambition, sexuality, faith and love.
The novel’s five tales follow Anna, an 18-year-old Jewish college student who meets a German businessman at a Greek diner on Queens Boulevard; Claire Seltzer of Great Neck, who endures a disastrous honeymoon in Paris; Rebecca, a spirited eighth grader in love with her math teacher; Sarah Reinhardt, the wife of a celebrity doctor living on Central Park West who enters a complicated love triangle; and Rachel Rosensweig, who wakes one morning to find her Columbia professor husband of 30 years has become a dangerous radical.
“My characters inhabit the Golden Era of the postwar, pre-pandemic world,” said Dicker, daughter of the former rabbi of the Marathon Jewish Community Center. “Age-old power struggles — between lovers, friends, parents and children — are illuminated and analyzed. Heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious, their stories disclose and document what it meant to be American, Jewish and female at this time.”
The stories are rich with cultural touchstones and marked by self-awareness, longing and sensuality, a representative of the synagogue said.
“Read in the aftermath of Oct. 7, and the tsunami of global Israel and Jew hatred that has ensued, my stories seem like historical artifacts, preserved in amber,” said Dicker, who grew up in Little Neck and Douglaston. “My stories invite the reader to fall in love with these characters and their long-gone world.”
The community is welcome to this event, which is sponsored by Nina Koppelman, at the Miriam & Moses Center for Pluralistic Adult Jewish Learning. The $18 ticket price includes a copy of the book. Registration is required at tinyurl.com/TBEDec7.
Temple Beth-El has served the community for nearly a century at 5 Old Mill Road. Learn more at www.tbegreatneck.org, 516-487-0900 or info@tbegreatneck.org.
