Today we’d like to introduce you to Elan Barnehama.
Hi Elan, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
I am the progeny of refugees with thick accents who passed on the gloom of war and the promise of peace. They had the self-assurance that came from having survived and the mistrust of having had to. My mother’s family fled Berlin for Jerusalem when Hitler came to power. My father’s family escaped Vienna for Haifa in the days following Kristallnacht. A decade later my father contracted polio during that global epidemic and was shipped off to New York City for medical care. That’s where he met my mother, who was visiting relatives. And New York City is where they stayed and where I was raised.
While I have moved around a bit on both coasts, Southern California and the Northeast, one of the constants in my life is a group of friends, brothers actually, that I met when I was 14. They are my chosen family and I’ve written about them in the HuffPost, and in the essay Showing Up, which was included in an anthology called Friends. And they are the inspiration for several of the main characters in my new novel, Escape Route.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’ve always felt like an outsider. When I was young, I rarely fit in anywhere, not easily anyway. I thought it had something to do with my name—no one knew how to say it, and no one could remember it. And then there was the father in a wheelchair. How many other kids had to push their father around the school on parents’ night? And then there were my eyes that seemed to operate one at a time.
But I had a wonderful relationship with my parents. They were both incredible risk takers, by DNA and necessity.
And while I never overcame feeling like an outsider, I stopped caring about it and moved on. Risk-taking is at the center of the changes I’ve made. Not taking risks is at the core of my greatest regrets. Maybe changing comes down to betting on myself. Sometimes it has taken me too long for me to make those bets. But all one can do is keep moving.
One thing I learned from my parents’ stories was to trust not know. Sure, what’s ahead might be horrible and miserable but that moment of not knowing holds the promise of possibility, of a new beginning ahead.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am unimpressed by meanness, pettiness, and malice. I am inspired by the different ways people are able to make good things happen. It’s a major theme of my current novel in progress. It turns out that it is also central to the Creative Non-Fiction story I am writing about my lifelong friend, Henry Shaw, and about his business philosophy, or lack of philosophy as he would claim, that makes him a business-oriented role model whose life exemplifies success without heartlessness. Kindness is his default setting.
I am an author and teacher. My second novel, Escape Route, was released in May 2022 by Los Angeles-based Running Wild Press. The book concerns the trauma that we inherit. Escape Route is set in the late 1960s and is told by the first-generation son of Holocaust survivors and NY Mets fan, who becomes obsessed with the Vietnam War and with finding an escape route for his family when he believes the US will round up and incarcerate its Jews. Zach, whose family lives in Queens, meets Samm, a seventh-generation Manhattanite, whose brother has returned from Vietnam with PTSD. Together, Zach and Samm explore protest, friendship, music, faith, and love during a time of upheaval and hope.
My work has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Entropy, Rough Cut Press, Boston Accent, Jewish Fiction, RedFez, HuffPost, and elsewhere. I was a Writer-In-Residence at Wildacres, NC, and Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts, AL, and the fiction editor of Forth Magazine LA. My first novel, Finding Bluefield, chronicles the lives of Nicky and Barbara as they seek love and family during a time when relationships like theirs were mostly hidden and often dangerous. I’ve taught writing at several colleges, worked with at-risk youth, had a gig as a radio news guy, and did a mediocre job as a short-order cook. These days I teach at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in NY and LA.
What matters most to you? Why?
I believe in the truth of stories. When we tell our stories, we place ourselves in the world. When we listen to stories, we understand how others place themselves in the world. When we spend time with the written word, we are linked to one another. We are not alone.
I’m interested in what happens away from the spotlight, inside the crowds. I am drawn to individual stories that contribute to a moment. We collaborate to create history. It’s a team sport. Great events are as much about the leaders as they are about the participants. We all enter the world in the middle of events, not all of them good. We can choose to accept our lives or moan about our circumstances. Or we can muster the courage to imagine a different life, a life that has yet to exist.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://elanbarnehama.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elan32
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elan.barnehama
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElanBarnehama
Image Credits
ESCAPE ROUTE, Running Wild, Press Pasadena, Lit Fest: Glass Art: Alexis Daniels
