Abraham Rothberg – författare

THE TORII GATE, a novel set in present-day Japan, involves Japanese and Americans caught up in a right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the Japanese government. The conspirators believe that democratic rule runs counter to Japanese history and tradition, and is an alien import of American culture. They are set on overturning the government to restore Japan to its "essential Samurai traditions" and Emperor-worship, and at the same time to purge Japan of American influence. The story takes the six major characters through the coup and its aftermath. Not only are they involved with one another politically, but personally, as colleagues, friends, and lovers. In portraying their lives and the events in which they are caught up, the novel depicts the dilemmas facing modern Japan, simultaneously evoking its ancient history and its history since Japan''s defeat in World War II.

WWII has just ended, and in the first postwar summer, a group of veterans come home bringing the war with them like a disease they have contracted and are intent on curing. A group of them arrive at a renowned Writers'' Workshop in NYC in search of peace, purpose and meaning. In that workshop, under the tutelage of the strange and estranged Miss Whiteside, disappointed writer, and a veteran of her own wars, they try to come to terms with what they have done in the war, and what the war has done to them. These are veterans who are trying to put their experiences and insights down on paper for publication for others to read and understand. It is this "Beast in View" they all pursue, and it is in portraying that pursuit that Rothberg gives us a series of unforgettable events and characters who come to learn that peace is war by other means.

In the forest of life, each family is a single tree; in the forest of death, each family is blighted in its own particular way. No Travelers Returns portrays what happens to the members of the Brim family who, having survived the Great Depression and WWII, are stunned by the sudden death of the head of their family. Out of their heartbreak and mourning, unable to comfort or solace one another, the family ties are strained to the breaking point as each of them tries to hold on to differing loves for their husband and father as well as their love for one another. During the year following the death, the grief stricken and confused family struggles to cope with their sorrows. How each of the Brims does so is told from their own viewpoints with power and poignancy. No Travelers Returns is a novel that affirms the family as the most intimate and important haven in life while at the same time recognizing its complexities and difficulties as the smallest community in the larger society.

THE WALLS AND THE GATES is a panoramic novel of modern life, from the Great Depression to the upheavals of the 1960s, dealing with the lives and fates of a varied group of fascinating human beings: An Irish-American family of immigrants whose father works on the New York City docks; a family of Tsarist refugees from the Soviet Union whose father remains an activist anti-Communist political; still another family, of immigrant Italians, who fled their native country and have since prospered in the California wine country. We see the interlocking fates of the two major characters, best friends, as the Irish American boy struggles to become a doctor, and the Russian American boy, a musical genius, struggles to become an internationally known concert pianist. We watch their conflicts with themselves, with one another, and with their lives and times, their successes and defeats, until, finally, they come to understand that "Tears may open the gates, but joy will bring down the very walls."