College Commons

Novelist Howard Langer transplants a fictional Hasidic Dynasty to the heart of segregated America, to discover a truly New World.Biography: Howard Langer was born in New York and brought up on the west side of Manhattan. His father served on the U.S.S. Missouri and was present at the Japanese surrender in 1945. His mother taught reading in Spanish Harlem for over thirty years. Howard attended the City College of New York when its English faculty included, among others, William Gaddis and Joseph Heller. He obtained a teacher’s degree from the Greenberg Institute in Jerusalem where he had the opportunity to study under Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Appelfeld. He holds an M.A.in English from the University of Toronto, where he studied Shakespeare with the great scholar-poet Sheldon Zitner, who first published his remarkable books of poetry at age 75, decades after Howard graduated.Howard won awards for his fiction as an undergraduate. He ultimately attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania where he has