Jay Neugeboren – författare

Prize-winning novelist Jay Neugeboren's third collection of short stories focuses on Jews in various states of exile and expatriation-strangers in strange lands, far from home. These dozen tales, by an author whose stories have been selected for more than fifty anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories, span the twentieth century and vividly capture brief moments in the lives of their characters: a rabbi in a small town in New England struggling to tend to his congregation and himself, retirees who live in Florida but dream of Brooklyn, a boy at a summer camp in upstate New York learning about the Holocaust for the first time, Russians living in Massachusetts with the family who helped them immigrate. In "The Other End of the World," an American soldier who has survived life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp grieves for members of his family murdered in a Nazi death camp, and in "Poppa's Books" a young boy learns to share his father's passion for the rare books that represent the Old World. "This Third Life" tells of a divorced woman who travels across Germany searching for new meaning in her life after her children leave home, while both "His Violin" and "The Golden Years" explore the plight of elderly Jews, displaced from New York City to retirement communities in Florida, who struggle with memory, madness, and mortality. Set in various times and places, these poignant stories are all tales of personal exile that also illuminate that greater diaspora-geographical, emotional, or spiritual-in which many of us, whether Jews or non-Jews, live.

In "Imagining Robert", Jay Neugeboren told the sad, deeply personal, often harrowing story of one man and one family's struggle with chronic mental illness. Now, he presents an overview of the entire field: a clear-eyed, articulate, comprehensive survey of our mental health care system's shortcomings and of new, effective, proven approaches that make real differences in the lives of millions of Americans afflicted with severe mental illness. A book for general readers and professionals alike, "Transforming Madness" is at once a critique, a message of hope and recovery, and a call to action. Filled with dramatic stories, it shows us the many ways in which people who have suffered the long-term ravages of psychiatric disorders have reclaimed full and viable lives.

Jay Neugeboren and his brother, Robert, grew up in Brooklyn in the years following World War II. Both brothers-smart, talented, and popular-seemed well on the way to successful lives when, for reasons that remain ultimately mysterious to this day, Robert had a mental breakdown at age nineteen. For the past forty years Jay has been not only his brother’s friend and confidant, but his sole advocate, as Robert continues to suffer from the ravages of the illness that has kept him institutionalized for most of his adult life.Imagining Robert tells the story of these two brothers and how their love for one another has enabled both to survive, and to thrive in miraculous, surprising ways. It is the most honest book yet on what it is like for the millions of families that must cope, day-by-day and year-by-year over the course of a lifetime, with a condition for which, in most cases, there is no cure. By never giving up hope and by valuing his brother’s uniqueness and humanity, Jay Neugeboren reveals how even the grimmest of lives can be sustained by the power of love.A film based on Imagining Robert aired on PBS nationally in 2003. With a new afterword that brings readers up to date on Robert’s life, Rutgers University Press is pleased make this highly praised book with its inspiring story available once more to the public.

A real-life mystery of books and basketball.Frankie King was a precocious student and a promising basketball player at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School in the early 1950s. Sportswriters were comparing Frankie to the greatest college and professional players of all time, and he was recruited as a starting guard at the University of North Carolina. But Frankie dropped out before playing a single game.This graphic novel follows King’s enigmatic life from its auspicious start in the limelight to his very reclusive existence in New York City, where he authored more than forty novels, including a popular series of cozy cat mysteries written under the pseudonym Lydia Adamson. Whatever Happened to Frankie King is the story of a unique and sometimes troubled life as well as a meditation on dreams realized, lost, and abandoned.

Danny is an orphan. He lives in Maimonides Home for Jewish Boys. Danny'' 12 years old decides to run away to find a former orphan. He wants to save the home from being closed

this story is set in the backdrop on the day the was finished with everyone rejoicing and a young boy who shares the excitement in the streets with his friends. Only going down a alleyway they encounter some men beating up a young lad and are warned never to tell anyone especially their family who were the well known mobster family because retribution is their middle name. Itsd the story of a boy who ends up taking over the family business

Neugeboren's debut collection of stories and third book. The title story, actually a novella, won the Transatlantic Review Novella Award, tells the story of Corky's baseball-playing brother, "probably the most famous guy in our neighborhood in Brooklyn," and is narrated by Howie. This adolescent Howie is also the voice behind five other stories within the collection, all also set in Brooklyn. Neugeboren's ability to use sports as his arena for fictional settings is top-notch.

Although the voices and settings of these tales are diverse, their central concerns remain constant. Neugeboren explores the precarious nature of family life and those elements--madness, betrayal, loss--that often shape and threaten it. He writes about the mysterious, sad, surprising, and sometimes beautiful ways in which love expresses itself. He reveals how our choices, large and small, inform and define our lives. Whether writing about a black American musician in Paris or a documentary filmmaker in Maine, about a boy grieving for the death of his father or parents for the loss of their children, about divorce or city life or basketball or mental illness, Neugeboren brings to his craft a profound knowledge of the heart''s imperatives. This volume is the mature, seasoned work of one of our finest writers.

Neugeboren's second novel is the story of Harry Meyers--New York schoolteacher, alienated Jew, aging widower resigned to lonely retirement--and of what happens to him when his uneasy peace is shattered by violence.It is a taut, powerful story, quick with suspense, and original in approach. Neugeboren captures the brutality, the comic madness, the very texture of existence seething with the West Side's rooming-house ghetto.

The shared qualities of friendship and the healing arts are the subject of this riveting memoir of one man''s battle with heart disease. When, in February 1999, Jay Neugeboren discovered he needed emergency quintuple-bypass surgery, he embarked on a journey that just began on the operating table. At sixty, he was the picture of health, swimming a mile a day and playing tennis and basketball regularly -- often with teenagers. How could he possibly have heart disease? But as he soon came to know, the difference between being healthy and being sick, and between receiving good care and receiving misdiagnoses, can be alarmingly narrow. Fortunately, on his side were four lifelong friends, all prominent physicians -- a cardiologist, a psychologist, a neurologist, and one of the world''s pioneers in AIDS medicine -- who helped him sift through the contradictory advice and the uneasiness one feels when life lies in the hands of strangers who are doctors. Guiding him through the system and relying on the strength of their childhood bonds, born from their Brooklyn upbringing, his friends in effect saved his life and opened his eyes to the ways -- good, bad, miraculous, and at times chilling -- in which medicine is practiced in the United States today. In this book, Jay sets out to understand how and why he nearly died, and to find out what we know -- and don''t know -- about disease and illness in general. Joined by his friends, each of whom reflects on his own life as a physician, Jay examines the faith many of us place in the advanced technologies of modern medicine and how that often distracts us from the most fundamental health care tool -- an engaged physician who listens and cares. What he discovers, in part, is that the qualities that lie at the heart of friendship also define what we hope for, and are losing, in our doctors. At a time when our health care system continues to disappoint, Open Heart will resonate with every patient who has been shuttled between specialists, with every physician who has faced impossible time constraints and technologies, and with everyone who has helped a loved one through the maze of health care choices. Clear, compelling, comic, and inspiring, Open Heart is a story that will open eyes and hearts -- a memoir every patient, doctor, and care provider will want to read.

Published in 1970 as Neugeboren's 4th title after two novels and a story collection, Parenthesis: An Autobiographical Journey is the personal and political odyssey of the highly praised 30 year old in search of his country. Within, Neugeboren attempts to bridge the generation gap between artists of the 50's and 60's.What marks this book as different from many of those other tales chronicling American history at that time period is Neugeboren's having taken an outsider's viewpoint. During the height of his anti-Vietnam activities, Neugeboren and his wife moved to the village of Speracedes in Southern France. For eighteen months he wrote, visited friends, traveled, lived a quiet, intensely personal life, but still could not escape from his country.

Neugenboren's fifth book--Sam's Legacy covers both the life of Sam, a down-on-his-luck gambler who is also dealing with the legacy of memories of his Jewish father and grandfather, and the story of Madison Tidewater, the Negro Baseball League's 'Black Babe,' current janitor, and how their paths cross. The differences in how the two men resolve their loss of faith brings the novel together.