Yid Lit: Richard Zimler
Image by Eva Carasol
Novelist Richard Zimler writes suspense thrillers set in Jewish history, earning him the moniker “the Jewish Dan Brown.”
His novel, “The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon” is a murder mystery set in Portugal during the Spanish Inquisition. “The Seventh Gate” is takes place in 1930s Berlin, where a hero must translate medieval Kabalistic texts to save the world from Hitler and Stalin. Zimler grew up an Ashkenazi Jew in New York, but became fascinated with the Sephardi Jewish experience, another subject about which he often writes.
Zimler’s new novel, “The Warsaw Anagrams” is set in the Warsaw Ghetto during the early 1940s. In it, a middle-aged psychiatrist must unravel the mystery of who killed his grand nephew, but he is an ibur, or a ghost, with remaining task to complete before he can cross over to the other side. The book is already a bestseller in Europe.
I spoke with Richard Zimler recently, where he called in from his home in Portugal.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
