City Tech professor’s new novel explores world of Turkish Jews

Brooklyn BookBeat

May 9, 2016 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

City Tech English Professor Jane Mushabac. Photo courtesy of City Tech

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The City Tech Bookstore and Café will host a book reading and signing event with English Professor Jane Mushabac to celebrate the publication of her novel “His Hundred Years, A Tale” (Albion-Andalus Books, 2016), published under her pen name Shalach Manot. The novel, which won the Leapfrog Press award, is about a Turkish Jew, a peddler, in the fast-deteriorating Ottoman Empire and in New York.

The event will take place on May 12 from 3 to 5 p.m. The City Tech Bookstore and Café is located at 259 Adams St. in Downtown Brooklyn.

Mushabac’s first novel has received high praise. Morris Dickstein, author of “Gates of Eden” and “Dancing in the Dark,” writes, “With its crisp detail and dappled mosaic narrative, ‘His Hundred Years’ is a Jewish immigrant tale with a difference. The initial milieu is Sephardic, Turkish, Ladino, not European, and the protagonist, a buoyant and irrepressible salesman, is the furthest thing from Arthur Miller’s defeated figure. This is a finely written novel.”

Elisabeth Gitter, author of “The Imprisoned Guest,” says, “This is a graceful, witty and bittersweet story. In recounting the adventures of her irresistible, funny and indomitable polyglot hero, Shalach Manot both recreates the world of Turkish Jewry and makes an original and compelling contribution to American immigrant literature.”

Mushabac teaches creative writing and was City Tech’s 2011 “Scholar on Campus.” She wrote “His Hundred Years, A Tale” with the support of a Mellon Fellowship and three PSC-CUNY Research Foundation Creative Writing grants.

In addition to her writing on Sephardic culture, Mushabac writes about New York City history and American literature. She has published “A Short and Remarkable History of New York City” (Fordham University Press and the Museum of the City of New York, 1999), a “Best of the Best” of the American Association of University Presses, now in its fifth printing, and “Melville’s Humor: A Critical Study” (Archon, 1982). She has contributed essays on Melville to Modern Philology, Columbia Journal of American Studies, and a Modern Language Association volume. She has also written a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded podcast, “Civil War Stories,” about Walt Whitman.

For more information, contact the bookstore at 718.855.7339 or visit janemushabac.com.