Pearl Abraham

Website: www.pearlabraham.com
Residence : New York, NY

Biographical information

Pearl Abraham is the author of the widely acclaimed, recently published novel, The Seventh Beggar, about which Harold Bloom wrote, "By a kind of miracle of sympathetic imagination, Pearl Abraham has been able to revivify what may be the most spiritually disturbing of all Chasidic tales."

The Romance Reader, her first novel, was a finalist for The Discover New Writer's award, named 'Best Book of 1995' by Library Journal, and selected as first title by Contra Costa Times of San Francisco. It was also on bestseller lists in Germany and The Netherlands. About Giving Up America, her second novel, one critic wrote "In spare prose, with painstaking attention to quotidian detail, the book magnifies the anticlimactic dissipation of love and unflinchingly dissects the familiar, and often irreconcilable tension between commitment and self-realization, daily partnership and romantic fantasy…A page-turner."

Abraham is also the editor of the Dutch anthology Een sterke vrouw: Jewish Heroines in Literature (Meulenhoff, 2000). Recent essays appeared in The Michigan Quarterly, Religion in America, and The Forward. An essay titled "Divinity School or Trusting the Act of Writing," is forthcoming in an anthology from Schocken Books. Recent short stories have appeared in The Forward and Brooklyn Noir; "Dybbuk on Ebay" is forthcoming in May in Epic Magazine. Abraham has taught at the MFA Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College, at The University of Houston, and at New York University. Her paper, "Text as Teacher: The Modernity of Nachman of Bratslav," delivered at the 2003 MLA conference, can be read at www.pearlabraham.com

Abraham grew up in a Hasidic family, the third of nine children. She graduated from Hunter College and received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from New York University. She lives in Manhattan.

Discussion topics

• "Divinity School or Trusting the Act of Writing," On becoming a writer
• Kabbalah 201 (See Madonna for Kabbalah 101)
• Trust the Tale: The place of Yiddish Literature
  • Badkhns, Fools, and Demons
  • Nachman of Bratslav
  • Not the Image of an Ideal: Jewish heroines in Literature

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