Shirley Russak Wachtel

Spanning decades, an unforgettable novel about reckoning with the past, the true nature of friendship, and the dream of finding home. 1944, Poland. Jacob Stein and Zalman Mendelson meet as boys under terrifying circumstances. They survive by miraculously escaping, but their shared past haunts and shapes their lives forever. Years later, Zalman plows a future on a Minnesota farm. In Brooklyn, Jacob has a new life with his wife, Esther. When Zalman travels to New York City to reconnect, Jacob's hopes for the future are becoming a reality. With Zalman's help, they build a house for Jacob's family and for Zalman, who decides to stay. Modest and light filled, inviting and warm with acceptance--for all of them, it's a castle to call home. Then an unforeseeable tragedy--and the grief, betrayals, and revelations in its wake--threatens to destroy what was once an unbreakable bond, and Esther finds herself at a crossroads. A Castle in Brooklyn is a moving and heartfelt immigration story about finding love and building a home and family while being haunted by a traumatic past.

A Castle in Brooklyn

A Novel

Castle in Brooklyn

"The essence of a poem" writes Shirley Russak Wachtel in this poetry collection spanning over thirty years, "is the middle of things." This notion is beautifully illustrated as, in a variety of poetic styles including rhyme, free verse, pantoume, and haiku, she illumines life's "ordinary" activities. Whether it is contemplating a red cardinal in her own backyard, emptying the sand from the pockets of her son's shorts, making a tuna fish sandwich, or watching the swollen backs of old women receding in the distance, these lyrical discoveries explore the supreme beauty in life's smallest, most precious, moments. PRAISE for IN THE MELLOW LIGHT "These poems by Shirley Russak Wachtel are crisp as April's morning air. They are crisp with human detail even as they connect us with the wide world of nature. Wachtel has a great heart, and she has the ability to let us see this great heart, her marvelous perceptions, through her poetry, her art. Praise!" -Emanuel di Pasquale, author of Cartwheel to the Moon (Cricket Books, 2003), Writing Anew: New and Selected Poems (Bordighera, 2007), winner of the Chelsea Award for Poetry and The Raiziss/dePalchi Fellowship for translations from the Italian (sponsored by Academy of American Poets). "Shirley Russak Wachtel's poetry is grounded in the everyday of middle-class America, old Little League T-shirts, dogs dreaming of running through high grass, the slow, steady passage of days in a suburban neighborhood. What makes her poetry so effective is the realization of the miraculous hiding within the commonplace...matched effectively by Wachtel's skillful use of refrain. Overall, Wachtel's poetry reminds one of a walk along the beach--it is to be savored for the rhythmic music of the surf as well as for the beautiful treasures one often discovers deposited by the tide, waiting to be discovered." -Mathew V. Spano, PhD, author of over sixty poems, featured in dust of summers (Red Moon Press, 2007); Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Written About the Game (Norton, 2007); and The Poets of New Jersey: From Colonial to Contemporary (Jersey Shore Press, 2006).

Collected Poems

In the Mellow Light

THe MUSIC MAKERS by Shirley Russak Wachtel, author of the acclaimed memoir, MY MOTHER'S SHOES, is the story of five individuals living in upstate New York: Virginia, a divorcee embarking on a new career as she worries over the demands of her grown daughters; Joshua, a widower haunted by the memories of his lost wife as he faces a rebellious son; Christine, an artist who struggles with a terrible secret; Adam who finds himself in the first throes of love with the wrong person; and David, a Holocaust survivor facing his last days frightened by memory loss as he clings to the tattered images of his past. Their different lives and concerns are suddenly drawn together by the appearance of a mysterious young boy. Ordinary people with life issues from which none of us can escape, they each ultimately overcome struggles, finding a sense of "harmony" as they are inspired by something which none of them ever anticipated. Heartrending and beautiful, THE MUSIC MAKERS is an unforgettable tale of characters full of life and passion so that coming to the last page, the reader will find not only the end of the book but the end of a friendship as well.

Shirley Russak Wachtel

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