Publisher's Synopsis
Beautifully written...grittily honest...delightfully charming...
Readers have spoken. They wanted more from this masterpiece. So 10 new chapters have been added in what many cite as among the finest coming-of-age memoir ever written. Legendary novelist Jack Engelhard (Indecent Proposal) recovers the past with fresh gems in this award-winning book, honored, later in film, for its unique, minimalist style that delivers absolute brilliance. Each short chapter sparkles and shines in this little memoir that could.
Torn from their homes in France at the onset of the Nazi invasion, and after a harrowing escape across the Pyrenees, the Engelhard family -- Noah, Ida, Sarah and Jack -- must begin lives as refugees in a new world -- first Canada (Montreal), later the United States. The experiences that shaped young Jack Engelhard were those that profoundly changed the world. Engelhard, often likened to Hemingway and James M. Cain for precision, helps us understand that life itself is the process of learning who you are.
Reviews:
"In Escape from Mount Moriah, Jack Engelhard achieves the impossible. In a single story, a single page, a single paragraph, even a single sentence, he combines a deep, abiding love with the unvarnished, penetrating gaze of the past, gritty realism with sublime philosophy, brevity with depth, the quintessentially Jewish with the essentially universal, and witty humor with the utmost seriousness."
- Nissan Ratzlav Katz, former Opinion Editor for Israel National News.com
"For my money every one of the 28 stories in this memoir has a latent brilliance and character unmatched in any published stories of their kind. Jack Engelhard is the last of the Hemingways."
- John W. Cassell, author of Crossroads: 1969
"The refugee stories Engelhard preserves are boyhood memories of an almost Tom Sawyer character... adventurous, humorous, sometimes wonderfully strange exploits of a youth during his family's adjustment to a new world."
- Chris Leppek, Jewish News (Denver)
"This book is a winner within its own niche of brilliance...to the child in us, living eternally. Engelhard's balsamic bible of a book."
- Linda Shelnutt
About the Author:
Contemporaries have hailed novelist Jack Engelhard as "the last Hemingway" and of being "a writer without peer and the conscience of us all." The New York Times commended the economy of his prose... "precise, almost clinical language." His bestselling novel Indecent Proposal made him internationally famous as the foremost chronicler of moral dilemmas and of topics dealing with temptation. Works that followed won him an even greater following, such as Escape from Mount Moriah, his book of memoirs that won awards for writing and for film. His latest novel Compulsive draws us into the mind of a compulsive gambler in a work stunningly brilliant and original, and seductively readable. Engelhard writes a weekly column for The Washington Times. His website: www.jackengelhard.com
