Literary Modiin - March 2023 Author Event

About the authors:

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, author of debut novel, The Promise of a Normal Life, has two poetry collections Girl as Birch and Opinel. Her work has appeared in Slate, Agni, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Northwest Review, the Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Harvard Review, Green Mountain Review, Pleiades, and many other magazines. She taught creative writing at Tufts University for twenty-three years and has received writing fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Marlborough, NH where she created and runs the reading series, The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville.

Harry Lenga, who tells his story in The Watchmakers, was born in 1919 to a Chassidic family in Kozhnitz, Poland. He and his brothers learned to fix watches from their father, a skill that saved their lives over and over again in the German concentration camps during World War II. All of the brothers survived. After liberation by the U.S. Army, Harry came to the United States in 1949. He raised a family in St. Louis, where he worked as a watchmaker for nearly thirty years. Harry spent his retirement giving interviews and speaking to school students about how he and his brothers survived the Shoah. In 1998, he moved to Israel with his wife Dorothy. Harry died on January 2, 2000, at the age of eighty. Although he won’t be directly participating in the event, Harry’s presence will be with us in this conversation. Scott Lenga is Harry’s son. Scott interviewed his father on video for some 37 hours in the early 1990s and those interview tapes sat in a cabinet for 20 years while he told his daughters stories about the Grandfather who they never really knew. In 2015, Scott started compiling and editing this interview material so these stories, told in his father’s voice, would be accessible to his daughters and future generations. This project grew into an obsession and now a book, The Watchmakers, that relates the extraordinary saga of the Lenga brothers to the general public. Scott now lives in Raanana, Israel and works as a lawyer for high-tech companies.

Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf), which won the National Jewish Book Award, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short listed for the Tagore Prize, and was long

-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness. His short fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and

elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Born in Kolkata, India, he now lives in New York with his family.