Leslie Epstein papers

Leslie Epstein was born on May 4, 1938, in Los Angeles, CA. He is the son of screenwriter Philip and Lillian (Targen) Epstein. He married Ilene Gradman, November 1, 1969 and has three children: daughter, Anya, and twin sons, Paul and Theo. He received his BA from Yale University in 1960, a diploma from Oxford University in 1962, an MA from UCLA in 1963, and a D.F.A. from Yale in 1967. He is the current director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, Boston, MA. Epstein is the author of seven novels: P.D. Kimerakov (1975); King of the Jews: A Novel of the Holocaust (1979); Regina (1982); Pinto & Sons (1990); Pandaemonium (1997); Ice, Fire, Water: A Lieb Goldkorn Cocktail (1999); and San Remo Drive (2003), which is not represented in this collection. He also has two books of short stories: The Steinway Quintet Plus Four (1976), and Goldkorn Tales (three novellas, 1985). He has contributed stories, articles and reviews to periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Antaeus, Playboy, and Antioch Review. Epstein's' most controversial work has been his 1979 novel, King of the Jews. In it, he examines the role that some European Jews played in betraying their own people to the Nazis. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Alter states that until King of the Jews was published, "no work of fiction [had] opened up so fully the unbearable moral dilemma in which the Judenrat members found themselves, governing with a pistol at their heads, administering the processes of death, corrupted of course by their awful power, yet trying to preserve life when there was no real way to preserve it."