Fiddling with writing, lawyer pens award-winning book about busking rabbi in NYC
Winning the National Jewish Book Award for his debut novel ‘The Last Dekrepitzer’ at age 74, banjo-playing law prof Howard Langer says it’s not always about writing what you know
Reporter at The Times of Israel
It took Howard Langer two years from his first serious attempt at writing — 60 pages longhand in pencil — to complete what would become “The Last Dekrepitzer.” It took almost two more years for the 74-year-old to find an agent and publisher.
“I was 70 and I wanted to write my whole life, and so I said to myself, ‘You know, if you don’t start now it’s not going to happen.’ So I sat down the next morning and began,” said Langer, a Philadelphia attorney who also teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School.
His persistence paid off — Langer’s debut novel about a fiddling Hasidic rabbi won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award and was shortlisted for The Athenaeum of Philadelphia’s 2024 Literary Award.
“I was stunned when I received the call telling me of the award,” Langer said.
Though news of the award might have rendered Langer momentarily speechless, he has long dreamt of writing a novel. Yet, even after receiving a master’s degree in literature from the University of Toronto in 1973, it would be decades before Langer decided that if he wanted to write a novel, it was “now or never.”
The novel tells the tale of Sam Lightup, the lone descendant of the Dekrepitzer Rebbes, leaders of a fictional Hasidic dynasty from Poland, who is discovered busking at the Columbus Circle subway stop in New York City in 1962. An odyssey of love and loss, the story also mines questions of faith and Jewish and Black relations, which Langer said he believes have been tense in recent years.
“I wanted in some way to ameliorate that,” said Langer, who lives in Philadelphia with his wife.
Lightup, who readers quickly learn was born Shmuel Meier Lichtbender, grows up in an isolated Polish shtetl. When World War II erupts, he is dislodged from his sheltered, pre-determined path. The Russians capture him and force him to serve in the Red Army. Three years later, he returns to his village only to find widespread devastation and death in the wake of the Holocaust.
Carrying next to nothing save for an old family violin, Lichtbender embarks on an odyssey that eventually takes him to America, where he settles in a Black community in the Mississippi Delta. He changes his name to Sam Lightup, joins a blues band and meets his great love, Lula, a Black woman who converts to Judaism. Their union enrages local Klansmen, who burn a cross on their front lawn. The incendiary act compels Lightup to flee north to Harlem. Soon after Lightup is discovered fiddling at a subway station, he finds work with a Jewish man repairing fiddles saved from the Holocaust.
While authors are often told to “write what you know,” Langer didn’t draw from family history to recreate Lightup’s experience as a Jewish immigrant thrust into Jim Crow South.
While his paternal grandfather was born in Proskurov, which is a city in present-day Ukraine, his maternal grandparents were born in the United States.
“I think any disillusionment with the shtetl comes from the tension between my Orthodox upbringing and my American identity,” Langer said.
The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The Times of Israel: Regarding the title, where does “Dekrepitzer” come from?
Howard Langer: I don’t have any romantic view of the shtetl or what I would call the “Fiddler on the Roof” life of Jewish Europe. It used to be around the Shabbos table that my sons and I would make up funny names for Hasidic sects, and one day, I said the Dekrepitzers.
When I finally sat down to write, I kept the name because it reflected my attitude. So although the book really isn’t very funny at all, what began as something of a joke stayed.
Music underscores the book, from Hasidic niggunim — melodies without lyrics — to gospel and blues. Where did the inspiration for this come from?
Rebbe Kalonymus Kalman Shapira served as the rabbi in the Warsaw ghetto. He was known for leading Hasidim and for fiddling. I filed that idea in the back of my head as something that would be interesting to write about.
Originally, all I wrote was a short story about a man playing the fiddle at the Columbus Circle subway station and being discovered as this Hasidic rabbi with a Black English accent. To be honest, my therapist said to me, “Howie, that’s not a short story, that’s a novel.” And I came home and said to myself, “If she tells me it’s a novel, I’ve got to take that seriously.”
And so you began to write.
During COVID, my son, who is an MFA, urged me to watch a workshop on Zoom by George Saunders. I admired his novel “Lincoln at the Bardo” and I was blown away by his presentation.
I was deeply taken with the three things he said. One, if you want to write, you have to stop talking about it, you’ve got to stop thinking about it. You’ve got to sit down at the table with a pencil. Two, you have to remember the goal is to get the reader to turn to the next page. And finally, he said, there is no end to revision.
Sam Lightup, or Shmuel Meier, doesn’t seem to have made peace with the question of God, he seems to wrestle with his faith.
The issue that emerged while I was writing was, what difference does it practically make knowing there’s a God? Shmuel Meir knows there’s a God because God revealed himself — he had this epiphany when he went back to Dekrepitz. But what use is that to Shmuel Meier, because the whole tradition he was given was totally violated — the contract was broken (with the Holocaust).
One of the first scenes after Sam reunites with his wife Lula, a Black woman, and their son Moses, takes place in Steinberg’s Dairy Restaurant. It’s a painful moment where we see Lula experience a different kind of racism than she had in the Jim Crow South.
In the north, the discrimination is more subtle. I tried to imagine what it would be like for a Black woman to sit down in a restaurant or shul in the 1950s and 1960s, what humiliations she would experience in the north. It would be patronizing and she would feel terribly lonesome.
What surprised you the most while writing the book?
The most surprising to me was the scene between the Reverend Gary Davis and the Bobover Rebbe — two real people who I studied and fictionalized. I said to myself, “What would happen if the Reverend Gary Davis and the Bobover Rebbe found themselves in the back seat of a car together?”
And in the end, I thought the scene in which the Rebbe so easily falls into conversation with Davis and shows him immediate respect, recognizes the profundity of Davis’s music, and gladly accepts his cigar, reveals the great tzidkus (righteousness) of the Bobover and also revealed the depth of Davis, who sees himself as God’s vehicle. The two kind of meld when Davis sings “Twelve Gates to the City.” The Rebbe asks if he wrote it, and Davis says it was revealed to him. The Rebbe realizes that it is more than the song that was revealed, and Davis confirms it was the heavenly city, the gates and the song.
In the book, Lightup learns to repair Holocaust violins and help distribute them to schools in Harlem. Where did you do your research for this?
I did a lot of reading on the internet about it.
Then, at one point, I was sitting in shul in Jerusalem next to a friend of mine who elbowed me and said, “The man sitting next to you makes violins.” His name is Dr. Jean Pisante, he’s a French psychologist and makes violins as a hobby. He showed me how to make violins and he explained to me that the name of the last piece you put in a violin is called a “soul.”
What about your own musical background?
I was in a terrible accident about 10 years ago. A car hit me while I was riding my bike. Both of my legs were shattered and I had a broken finger. I knew I was going to be home for a year recovering, and I decided I can’t just read books. So I learned to play the banjo. I’m a terrible banjo player, but I still play.
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