EPSTEIN, LESLIE

EPSTEIN, LESLIE (1938– ), U.S. writer. Born in Los Angeles and having a father as well as an uncle who were screenwriters (Julius J. and philip g. epstein ), Leslie Epstein was no outsider to Hollywood life: his San Remo Drive: A Novel from Memory (2003) is a recounting of his childhood as well as its repossession by the novel's protagonist. Its writing must have been cathartic yet this act of purgation runs throughout much of Epstein's work, which deals with those who are powerless or deluded or both, and who are presented to us in a tight narrative line that offers dark satire as a way of recounting the horrific. The King of the Jews (1986), a meditation upon the uses of power and self-deception, explores the nature of Trumpelman (based on Rumkowski, the ruler of the Lodz ghetto). Though the book is a controversial one, Epstein being charged with trivializing the Holocaust, the novel has also won much praise for its strongly controlled tone that veers between pathos and comedy. His most endearing character is Leib Goldkorn, a former Viennese musician, who undergoes a series of mishaps yet whose reflections are by turns chilling, sweet, and astonished by the chaos and destruction that he sees. He threads his way through The Steinway Quintet (1976), Goldkorn Tales (1985), and Ice Fire Water (1999). Epstein attended Yale and Oxford and served as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for over 20 years. (Lewis Fried (2nd ed.)