Wayne Hoffman – författare

An accidental friendship unfolds between a widowed octogenarian Orthodox rabbi and a gay, Jewish twenty-something in this witty & thoughtful novel.

In Yiddish, there is a word for it: bashert—the person you are fated to meet. Twentysomething Benji Steiner views the concept with skepticism. But the elderly rabbi who stumbles into Benji’s office one day has no such doubts. Jacob Zuckerman’s late wife, Sophie, was his bashert. And now that she’s gone, Rabbi Zuckerman grapples with overwhelming grief and loneliness.

Touched by the rabbi’s plight, Benji becomes his helper—driving him home after work, sitting in his living room listening to stories. Their friendship baffles everyone, especially Benji’s sharp-tongued, modestly observant mother. But Benji is rediscovering something he didn’t know he’d lost. Yet the test of friendship, and of both men’s faith, lies in the difficult truths they come to share. With each revelation, Benji learns what it means not just to be Jewish, but to be fully human—imperfect, striving, and searching for the pieces of ourselves that come only through another’s acceptance.

Praise for Sweet Like Sugar 

“A story that is beautifully told, profound and funny.” —Jonathan Rosen, author of Joy Comes In The Morning

“A stirring story about the face of love on many different levels.” —Carolyn Hessel

Who was behind the brutal murder of my great-grandmother? wondered Wayne Hoffman, a New York City–based journalist and novelist. The crime wasn’t just a family legend—it made headlines across Canada in 1913—but her killer had never been found. In The End of Her, Hoffman meticulously researches this century-old tragedy, while facing another: his mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s.

Weaving back and forth between past and present, Hoffman invokes in dramatic detail the life and death of his immigrant great-grandmother in Winnipeg’s Hebrew Colony, and his mother’s downward spiral. In the process, he discovers an extended family that has been scattered across thousands of miles for a hundred years.