The Spirit Of Tikkun Olam In Us All

A novelist/poet, potter and co-founder of the Always Art artist’s collaborative, Rhoda Kaplan Pierce has placed pieces in numerous literary journals and will be sharing selections tomorrow night at Curley’s from Nobody Really Leaves, The Apple That Wanted To Be Famous (New Rivers Press), as well as 2004’s Leah’s Blessing (Kehillat Press, 2002), a novel relating the title character’s struggle with the dual deaths of her alienated daughter’s husband, victim of a Jerusalem bombing and that of her mother in Borough Park, Brooklyn, where she first turned her back on an Orthodox Jewish upbringing.

As with much of Rhoda’s work celebrating one’s inner child, Leah Applebaum’s unexpected reconciliative, healing journey shared with Maya, an Arab-Israeli woman, affirms the conviction that, despite the trials and tragedy of a violent, chaotic world, we are all one.

The former Poet in Residence of the New York City School System also collaborated with Sandie Bernstein, who has published poetry and other writing in The Journal of Reform Judaism, The Boston Globe, The Jewish Advocate, The Longfellow Society Journal, among other publications and is an 18-year veteran of Jewish communal services in the greater Boston area.

Their novel of Judaic magical realism, The Spirit of Kehillat Shalom (AuthorHouse, 2014), draws the reader into the mission of Serach, dispatched from the Garden of Eden by the prophet Elijah to come to the aid of the beleaguered rabbi Hillel Kramer, but, in the process, becomes beset, herself--in her guise as a volunteer office assistant--by the various personal problems of Kehillat Shalom’s congregation, both humorous and grave and is eventually torn between returning to Eden and remaining with the community of which she has become so fond.

You can visit her author page on Amazon here.