Leslie Epstein is a contemporary American novelist, critic, and educator. The fact that he is a comic writer who addresses serious subjects has proven controversial in the critical assessment of his work, particularly his treatment of the Holocaust....

Author of King of the Jews and the new novel Ice Fire Water, Leslie Epstein, 61, heads BU's creative writing program. The son of screenwriter Philip Epstein, he was raised in Hollywood. MUCH OF YOUR FICTION IS A SLAPSTICK TREATMENT OF TRAGIC EVENTS...

The Jewish Week 05-30-1997 Film Noir: Hollywood and the Holocaust collide in Leslie Epstein's 'Pandaemonium.' A child of Hollywood, novelist Leslie Epstein grew up with Gergory Peck as a neighbor, Elizabeth Taylor as a Sunday guest for bagels and lox, and home...

Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, edited by Derek Rubin. Schocken Books, 348 pages, $25.When I entered college, in the mid-1960's, my freshman class was asked to read two books over the summer: Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King...

Leslie Epstein's novel, King of the Jews, is loosely based on events in the ghetto of Lodz under the German occupation of World War II. (p. 76) Although its central character, I. C. Trumpelman, is based on the actual chairman of the Lodz Judenrat, and though the book's descriptions of the local conditions derive from documented ghetto history, King of the Jews does not attempt a historical interpretation of either the ghetto Elder or of the ghetto itself. The book bears the same relation to th...

If writers got gold stars for the risks they took, Leslie Epstein would get a handful for the title story of this collection of short fiction. "The Steinway Quintet" belongs to that rare and difficult genre, the story that is in some sense "about" large intellectual and philosophical problems. Two gun-waving, pill-popping Puerto Rican J. D.'s break into the Steinway Restaurant on Rivington Street—once a favorite haunt of Sarah Bernhardt and Einstein, but now the lon...

[King of the Jews] is elegantly written, paced like a Burger-King commercial, and arranged with a very cunning eye for irony; its cumulative effect is that of an intricate artifice built on the grave of total horror. I am not accusing Epstein of bad taste; it is not really a question of that. Epstein's novel is somehow outside the range of taste, in the same way a novel might be if it were written by a dolphin…. Parts of the book are astonishingly beautiful; a scene, for instance, where doomed...