A Seat At The Table

When Joshua Halberstam was growing up in the 1960s, he'd walk to school crossing the streets of Borough Park and would hear his father's voice everywhere, from grocery stores, bakeries, tailor shops, open apartment windows and cars stopped at red lights. His father hosted a popular Yiddish radio show on WEVD, Chasidic Dertzayin, on which he narrated chasidic tales. Flash forward 50 years. While rummaging in a closet in his childhood home, several years after his father's death, Halberstam came across a large box filled with typewritten stories in Yiddish. These were the texts his father wrote and read on the air. Halberstam, a philosopher, professor and author who traded Borough Park for the Upper West Side of Manhattan, began translating the stories into English, taking certain liberties, with the hope of bringing them to a wider audience. Ultimately, the stories inspired Halberstam to write fiction. A Seat at the Table (Sourcebooks) is Halberstam's first novel, a deeply felt portrayal of the chasidic community of Borough Park in the early 1970s, reflected through the relationship of a young man coming of age and his father, a leading rebbe. Elisha tucks his payes behind his ears and heads to college in Manhattan, with his father's blessing, while continuing his Talmudic studies in Brooklyn. He soaks up information about jazz, Kafka, anthropology and city streets, all the while making new friends including Katrina who comes from Wisconsin, wears pink sneakers with iridescent green laces, loves literature and gets him to dance. Questioning his faith and identity, he struggles, torn between his love and respect for his father and their conversations over a page of Talmud, and the allure of ideas, people and places beyond Brooklyn. In the background, the war in Vietnam looms. Reading Kafka's stories at the suggestion of Katrina leads Elisha to the writer's letters, essays and more stories, and he learns that Kafka met with his great-grand