By Martin Sieff
Nearly 40 years now since I discovered the hilarious, joyous, subversive, vicious and wise books of Stefan Heym: If you hate Nazis, Communism, Anti-Semites, Bigots, Censorship and Big Bullies of every persuasion hunt down and devour the works of Heym: You have found your champion. You have found your lifelong friend. When writer Stefan Heym – like George Orwell he started Life under another name but do not be deceived, Heym is who he was – died suddenly on a visit to Israel in December 2001 at the age of almost 89, the world outside Germany, the home he hated, paid almost no notice. Now, more than 19 years on from his passing Heym has not been forgotten in America and Israel only because he was never remembered there in the first place.
Detail from Michelangelo s Jeremiah on the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel.
Henry (Hank) Millstein is a long-time peace, interfaith, and labor activist living in Northern California. He’s a fiction writer and journalist whose work often appears in
People’s World, and he’s a longtime member of the National Writers Union. Staff writer Eric A. Gordon sat Hank down for a friendly chat about his newest book.
People’s World: The biblical world opens a ripe and rich field for writers to extrapolate for their own readers and their own time many of the social issues that concern them. I’m thinking of