Leslie Epstein, a celebrated novelist and writing teacher "who was born into Hollywood royalty--his father and uncle collaborated on the script for the classic 1942 film Casablanca," died May 18 at age 87, the New York Times reported. Epstein's best known book was the novel King of the Jews (1979), "a powerful, biting, and at times humorous story about the leader of a Judenrat, or Jewish Council, in a Polish ghetto during the Holocaust."
Writing about the book in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Alter praised Epstein's focus on "the morally ambiguous politics of survival" practiced by Council leaders "who were both violently thrust and seductively drawn into a position of absolute power and absolute impotence in which no human being could continue to function with any moral coherence."
There were some negative reactions as well. Also writing in the Times, critic Anatole Broyard contended that the Jews in the novel "come very close to appearing silly or childish.... Many of them are manic, as if manic behavior were the Jew's cliché, as if he is shrill, excitable, the stand-up comic, the nudnik of history."
Although Epstein did not define himself as a Jewish writer, several of his stories and novels featured "the tragicomic adventures" of the character Leib Goldkorn, who appears in The Steinway Quintet: Plus Four (1976); Goldkorn Tales (1985); Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail (1999); and Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Leib Goldkorn (2012). In 2003, Epstein explored his family history in San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory, five interrelated stories about the Jacobis, a Hollywood family.
In an interview with Newsday in 1999, Epstein explained the 14-year gap before resurrecting Goldkorn in Ice Fire Water by saying that "his voice kept speaking to me," and the author's motivations had changed: "The fight against old age drives him. In Goldkorn Tales, it had been music and his magic flute. But in this book, it's the unsublimated Goldkorn, and his phallus has taken the place of his flute."
Epstein was born in Los Angeles, where his father, Philip Epstein, and Philip's twin brother, Julius, were screenwriters of popular movies that included The Man Who Came to Dinner, Arsenic and Old Lace, and the Oscar-winning Casablanca (written with Howard Koch).
Epstein's son Theo is the baseball executive who in 2004 helped the Boston Red Sox win their first World Series since 1918.
Leslie Epstein received a bachelor's degree in English from Yale University in 1960; studied anthropology as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford; and earned a master's degree in theater arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1963, and a Ph.D. in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1967.
He had launched his teaching career at Queens College in 1965, and in 1978 moved to Boston University, where he directed the creative writing program for 36 years. His students included award-winning authors Jhumpa Lahiri and Ha Jin. He taught his final class during this year's spring semester.
Lahiri said Epstein carefully analyzed his students' stories in single-spaced reviews, a page or two long, adding: "He was honest, sometimes to the point where it was hard to absorb the impact. But he would tell you why something was false and pinpoint what was off about it. You never approached your work in the same way."
