ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week's trivia question: What did people in the United States realize about sports for the first time in 1952?
David Hirshberg is the pseudonym for an entrepreneur who prefers to keep his business activities separate from his writing endeavors. He is a New Yorker who holds an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
His prize-winning first novel, My Mother's Son, is written as the memoir of Joel, a retired radio raconteur.
The story is set in Boston in 1952, and revolves around Joel's extended Jewish family. Through their relationships with other characters, especially in the areas of business and politics, the author entertainingly conveys the multiethnic character of the city, portraying the Irish, Italian and Jewish communities respectfully and without caricature.
The novel uses the events of Joel's family's life and the world in which he lived as a child as a vehicle for dealing with major issues that affected Americans then as well as today – disease, war, politics, immigration and business.
Much like the narrator in My Mother's Son, Hirshberg is a skilled storyteller in real life, as well as through his fiction. His interests outside of business are American history, Jewish literature and practices, the link between science and religion, the current cultural wars in our society, and English, Irish and Gordon setters.
You can order My Mother's Son here or here.