JustASC

Remember Bruce Jay Friedman? In the mid-1960s, it wasn’t unusual to hear his anxious, Jewish fictions mentioned in the same breath as those of Philip Roth. He wrote the play “Steambath,”  and co-wrote “Splash” and “Stir Crazy”; “The Heartbreak Kid” was based on one of his stories, and ”The Lonely Guy” was adapted from his book of humor.

NJJN’s Ron Kaplan catches up with the still-busy author on the publication of a new collection, Three Balconies: Stories and a Novella (Biblioasis):

After all these years, he still recalls the trauma of attending Hebrew school, his introduction into the Jewish community.

“The instructor hit me across the face with the Five Books of Moses for whispering to the guy next to me,” Friedman said, amazing himself with the memory. “Mr. Kaminetsky…you don’t forget that kind of name. I’ve thought about that for years and I ended up sympathizing with the poor man. Who knows what kind of pressure he was under.

“I always feel if I had one guiding individual to take me through what the religion was all about and get me interested, my life would have been a bit different.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.