Richard Zimler | |
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| Born | 1 January 1956 Roslyn Heights, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
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| Alma mater | Duke University Stanford University |
| Genre | Historical Fiction |
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Richard Zimler (born 1 January 1956 in Roslyn Heights, New York) is a best-selling author. His books, which have earned him a 1994 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and the 1998 Herodotus Award, have been published in many countries and translated into more than 20 languages.
Zimler graduated from Herricks High School in suburban New York in 1973. In 1977, he earned a bachelor's degree in Comparative Religion from Duke University and five years later obtained a master's degree in Journalism from Stanford University.
He was a Professor of Journalism at the University of Porto and College of Journalism for 16 years. He retired from teaching in 2006.
 | This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(July 2023) |
Richard Zimler's novel The Incandescent Threads was a finalist for one of the 2022 National Jewish Book Awards in the United States.
Zimler received the 2009 Alberto Benveniste literary prize in France for his novel Guardian of the Dawn. The prize is given to novels that have to do with Sephardic Jewish culture or history. It was awarded to him at a ceremony at the Sorbonne in January 2009.
Five of Zimler's novels - Hunting Midnight (2005), The Search for Sana (2007), The Seventh Gate (2009), The Warsaw Anagrams (2013) and The Night Watchman (2016) - have been nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the highest value literary prize in the English-speaking world.
His novel The Warsaw Anagrams was chosen as 2009 Book of the Year by the main Portuguese book magazine Ler and by the country's high school teachers and students (the 2010 Mariquis de Ouro prize). It was also chosen as one of the 20 Best Books of the Decade 2000-2009 by the country's foremost daily newspaper, Público. In August 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle described the book as follows: "Equal parts riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring and intelligent, this mystery set in the most infamous Jewish ghetto of World War II deserves a place among the most important works of Holocaust literature."
In 2009, Zimler wrote and acted in The Slow Mirror, a short movie based on one of his stories. Directed by Swedish-Portuguese filmmaker Solveig Nordlund, the short stars Portuguese actors Gracinda Nave and Marta Peneda. In May 2010, it won the Best Drama award from the New York Downtown Short Film Festival.
O Cão que Comia a Chuva, illustrated by the Portuguese artist Julio Pomar, won the prize for Best Children's Book of 2018 from the Bissaya Barreto Foundation of Portugal.
In July 2017, the city of Porto awarded Zimler its highest distinction, the Medal of Honor. At the ceremony, Porto mayor Rui Moreira described the novelist as "A citizen of Porto who was born far away, who makes Porto greater and grander... Zimler projects the city of Porto out into the world and brings the rest of the world to us."
Zimler has written five novels that explore the lives of different generations and branches of a Portuguese-Jewish family, the Zarcos. This series, whose works are intended to be read in any order, originated with The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon , which is narrated by a youthful kabbalist named Berekiah Zarco who survives the Lisbon Massacre of 1506. These novels explore such themes as Jewish mysticism; slavery; the devastating effect of the Inquisition on Portugal and its colonies; and the psychological conflict created in people who are forced to hide their faith. The novels are independent works and, according to Zimler, none of them should be considered a sequel. The books that make up the Sephardic Cycle are: The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, set in sixteenth century Portugal; Hunting Midnight, which takes place in Porto, London, New York and South Carolina in the early nineteenth century; Guardian of the Dawn, in which the main action takes place in Goa in the seventeenth century; The Seventh Gate, set in Nazi-controlled Berlin in the 1930s; and The Incandescent Threads, set mainly in New York and Montreal from 1970 to the present time but also with two long chapters that take place in Poland during and right after World War II. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly referred to The Incandescent Threads as "Exceptional... A richly drawn, original portrayal of tenacity and sacrifice." Two of the novels in the Sephardic Cycle have been nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award: Hunting Midnight and The Seventh Gate.[ citation needed ] All five books were Number 1 bestsellers in Portugal.
Zimler has also edited an anthology of short stories for which all the author's royalties go to Save the Children, the largest children's rights organization in the world. The anthology is entitled The Children's Hours. Participating authors include Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, André Brink, Markus Zusak, David Almond, Katherine Vaz, Alberto Manguel, Eva Hoffman, Junot Díaz, Uri Orlev and Ali Smith.
In August 2011, Zimler published his first book of poetry: Love's Voice: 72 Kabbalistic Haiku. The verses in the book express Jewish mystical ideas and imagery in the form of haiku.
Zimler has written five children's books that have been published in Portuguese: Maria e Danilo e o Mágico Perdido, Dança Quando Chegares ao Fim, Hugo e Eu e as Mangas de Marte, Se Eu Fosse and O Cão que Comia a Chuva.
In December 2018, Portuguese singer-songwriter Pedro Abrunhosa released a new album featuring a duet with American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams for which Zimler wrote the English version of the lyrics. The song is entitled Hold Me.
In 2019, Zimler published The Gospel According to Lazarus . [1] Novelist Peter Stanford called it "a brave and engaging novel... a page-turner. I simply had to keep going to the very end in order to know on earth what would happen." [2]
In March and April 2022, Zimler curated an exhibition of Outsider Art done by patients of the Magalhães Lemos Psychiatric Hospital in Porto. The works were exhibited at galleries in both Porto and Espinho.
During 2022 and 203, Zimler was one of three writers who speak weekly about literature on one of the Portuguese state radio stations, Antena 1. The program was entitled Biblioteca Pública. It ended in 2023.
Zimler has lived with Portuguese scientist Alexandre Quintanilha since 1978, when they met in San Francisco, California, They were married in August 2010, when same-sex marriage was legalized in Portugal. He has lived in Porto, Portugal since 1990. In 2002, he became a naturalized Portuguese citizen.[ citation needed ]
In April 2019, Zimler wrote an article for The Observer describing how his brother's death from HIV/AIDS at a young age affected his writing and, in particular, the themes of The Gospel According to Lazarus.
In June 2019, Zimler wrote an op-ed article in The Observer asserting that, in March 2019, his publicist told him that two cultural organisations in Britain had lost interest in hosting an event with him to promote his new book when they learned he was Jewish. The publicist asked not to be named and that the organisations not be identified. [3] According to Zimler, his publicist said that talks over hosting him were cut off over fears of anti-Israel protests. [4] [5] According to The Bookseller , a trade publication that covers the British publishing industry, both The Observer and The Guardian had checked and confirmed the account. [4] One Jewish writer queried why no other Jewish author had reported a similar experience in the UK. [6]
José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE ComSE GColCa, was a Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant."
SephardicJews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the Iberian Peninsula. The term, which is derived from the Hebrew Sepharad, can also refer to the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, who were also heavily influenced by Sephardic law and customs. Many Iberian Jewish exiled families also later sought refuge in those Jewish communities, resulting in ethnic and cultural integration with those communities over the span of many centuries.
Marranos is one of the terms used in relation to Spanish and Portuguese Jews who converted or were forced by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns to convert to Christianity during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but continued to practice Judaism in secrecy or were suspected of it, referred to as Crypto-Jews. "Crypto-Jew" is the term increasingly preferred in scholarly works, instead of Marrano.
Emma Lazarus was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish and Georgist causes. She is remembered for writing the sonnet "The New Colossus", which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty, in 1883. Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque, installed in 1903, on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus was involved in aiding refugees to New York who had fled antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, and she saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue. The last lines of the sonnet were set to music by Irving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty. The latter part of the sonnet was also set by Lee Hoiby in his song "The Lady of the Harbor" written in 1985 as part of his song cycle "Three Women".
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen was a Portuguese poet and writer. Her remains have been entombed in the National Pantheon since 2014.
In Jewish law and history, Acharonim are the leading rabbis and poskim living from roughly the 16th century to the present, and more specifically since the writing of the Shulchan Aruch in 1563 CE.
João Gonçalves Zarco was a Portuguese explorer who established settlements and recognition of the Madeira Islands, and was appointed first captain of Funchal by Henry the Navigator.
Spanish and Portuguese Jews, also called Western Sephardim, Iberian Jews, or Peninsular Jews, are a distinctive sub-group of Sephardic Jews who are largely descended from Jews who lived as New Christians in the Iberian Peninsula during the few centuries following the forced expulsion of unconverted Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. They should therefore be distinguished both from the descendants of those expelled in 1492 and from the present-day Jewish communities of Spain and Portugal.
The history of the Jews in Portugal reaches back over two thousand years and is directly related to Sephardi history, a Jewish ethnic division that represents communities that originated in the Iberian Peninsula.
Lazarus of Bethany, also venerated as Righteous Lazarus, the Four-Days Dead in the Eastern Orthodox Church, is the subject of a sign of Jesus in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus restores him to life four days after his death. The Eastern Orthodox and Catholic traditions offer varying accounts of the later events of his life.
Isaac Aboab da Fonseca was a rabbi, scholar, kabbalist and writer. In 1656, he was one of several elders within the Portuguese-Israelite community in the Netherlands who excommunicated Baruch Spinoza.
Beit El Kabbalist yeshiva is a center of kabbalistic study in Jerusalem. Today it consists of two buildings, one in the Ruhama neighbourhood of West Jerusalem, built in 1948, and another in Old City’s Jewish Quarter, built in 1974.
The history of the Jews in Brazil begins during the settlement of Europeans in the new world. Although only baptized Christians were subject to the Inquisition, Jews started settling in Brazil when the Inquisition reached Portugal, in the 16th century. They arrived in Brazil during the period of Dutch rule, setting up in Recife the first synagogue in the Americas, the Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue, as early as 1636. Most of those Jews were Sephardic Jews who had fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal to the religious freedom of the Netherlands.
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The Kadoorie Mekor Haim Synagogue is a synagogue of the Jewish community of Porto, situated in the civil parish of Lordelo do Ouro e Massarelos, the municipality of Porto, in the Portuguese northern district of Porto. Constructed along the Rua Guerra Junqueiro beginning in 1929 and inaugurated in 1938, it is the largest synagogue in the Iberian Peninsula.
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon is a novel by American-Portuguese author Richard Zimler. It was first published in Portuguese translation in 1996, after having been rejected by many American publishers. After reaching No. 1 on the Portuguese bestseller list, the book found success in other countries and has been a bestseller in 13, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Brazil and Australia. It has been published in 23 languages.
The Warsaw Anagrams is a 2009 novel by American-Portuguese author Richard Zimler. It has since come out in seven other languages: Portuguese, French, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, Italian and Spanish. It was a bestseller both in the UK and Italy. Set in the Warsaw ghetto subsequent to the Nazi occupation of Poland, the novel is both a noir thriller and exploration of the day-to-day heroism evidenced by the Jewish residents.
New Portuguese Letters is a literary work composed of letters, essays, poems, fragments, puzzles and excerpts from legal documents, published jointly by the Portuguese writers Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa in 1972. The authors became known internationally as "The Three Marias", which became the title of the book in its first translation to English.
The Gospel According to Lazarus is a 2019 novel by Richard Zimler.
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