Sheldon Greene

On a winter morning in western Pennsylvania, children stand shivering under a low gray sky. Their breath hangs in the air as they stand in a circle around the flagpole, saying a morning prayer while the flag snaps in the wind in front of a brick building that is part school, part home for the elderly. Inside, a wiry man with a Slavic accent has been arguing with teachers about the day’s lessons. Outside, he is leading what looks, at first glance, like a simple school ritual. Thousands of miles and two centuries away, on a Caribbean sugar island, a woman sits in a back room with enslaved girls. The house has gone quiet. A battered primer lies open on the table as the girls trace letters with fingers stiff from a day of hard labor. The woman, Amelia Sayre, knows that if she is discovered teaching them to read, the consequences will fall hardest on them. In Sheldon Greene’s novels, these rooms belong to The Lev Effect and Pursuit of Happiness . One is a Jewish boarding school and el...

  The man walking ahead has the easy posture of someone who believes the worst part of his life is over. He leaves a neighborhood cafe, coat buttoned, hat at the usual angle, book tucked under his arm. Streetlights turn the wet pavement into strips of gray and yellow. His steps echo off shop windows and shuttered doors. A few paces behind, another man matches his rhythm. To anyone watching, they are just two strangers heading the same way. His hands stay in his pockets. In one of them, his fingers rest on a loop of wire, carefully shaped and coiled so it can tighten in an instant. In the other pocket is a photograph of the man ahead, younger and in a different uniform. At a narrow spot in the street, the distance closes. The man at the rear calls out. The man in front half turns. There is a word, the beginning of recognition. Then the wire is over his head, the knee is in his back, and his body hits the cobblestones. The photograph is left with the body, as if someone were fili...

  From a distance, it looks like any other valley. A long green bowl, flanked by hills, stitched with paths that do not show up on official maps. In Sheldon Greene’s novels, such valleys are never just scenery. They are arguments. In Tamar , the Binyan valley holds a mixed Jewish and Native American community in the nineteenth-century American West. It is cultivated and remembered. Orchards are tended, water is diverted, homes are built and rebuilt. Festivals return with the seasons. The dead are buried in the valley’s hills, in places everyone in the community can locate by feel. For Tamar and her people, the valley is not “land” in the abstract. It is the place where their history has taken root. In After the Parch , the Glade is a forested bowl tucked inside a future California Republic damaged by drought, epidemic and political fracture. Forty families live there as deliberate outlaws, living around an old mine and growing food according to rules they have worked out for t...

  It starts with a sore elbow and a polite handshake. Nudelman’s bursitis has been getting worse for months. The cortisone shots hurt, the relief is temporary, and even turning over in bed has become an exercise in gritted teeth. He complains about it to his rabbi because that is what people do when they run out of things to tell their doctor. Rabbi Newman listens, winces in sympathy, and pats him lightly on the shoulder as they part in the foyer. Nothing special. No shofar blasts, no chant, just a friendly touch at the end of a conversation. Later that evening, watching television, Nudelman realizes the burning is gone. The ache that had colonized his days has disappeared so cleanly it feels as if it belonged to someone else. He stands up, flexes his arm, knocks over a vase in his excitement, and does the modern thing a man does when something inexplicable happens. He picks up the phone. “It is you,” he insists when the rabbi answers, already half apologizing for sounding su...