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About Erika Dreifus
Erika Dreifus is the author of Quiet Americans: Stories (Last Light Studio), which is an ALA Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title for outstanding Jewish literature. Quiet Americans was also named a Notable Book (The Jewish Journal) and a Top Small-Press Book (Shelf Unbound). Erika is a contributing editor for Fiction Writers Review and an advisory board member for J Journal: New Writing on Justice, and she wrote the section on “Choosing a Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing” for the second edition of Tom Kealey’s Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). Erika is also the editor/publisher of The Practicing Writer, a free (and popular) e-newsletter featuring advice, opportunities, and resources on the craft and business of writing for fictionists, poets, and writers of creative nonfiction.
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Tweets by @erikadreifusQuiet Americans - Stories by Erika Dreifus
A high-ranking Nazi’s wife and a Jewish doctor in prewar Berlin. A Jewish immigrant soldier and the German POWs he is assigned to supervise. A refugee returning to Europe for the first time just as terrorists massacre Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. A son of survivors and the family secrets modern technology may reveal. These are some of the characters and conflicts that emerge in Quiet Americans, in stories that reframe familiar questions about what is right and wrong, remembered and repressed, resolved and unending. Portions of the proceeds from sales of Quiet Americans are being donated to The Blue Card. Quiet Americans has been named a 2012 Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title (American Library Association) and recognized as a “Notable Book” (The Jewish Journal) and “Top Book” (Shelf Unbound).
Hi Erika,
I really was moved by J. Guzlowski’s poems. I, too, tend to write direct poems in plain language
and I wonder if I am at some disadvantage because I don’t have an English degree and I am no
literary intellectual.
I am not clever. I like to think that the content and simplicity of the work will let it shine, however it might. And, too, I often write poems because I am trying to claim a place in the story
of this country. I want to tell the stories that never got told about my people, my family and the
American experience of genocide on our own shores.
We all need to write and to read these stories because that measure of truth is healing and redemptive and may, someday, lead to change in the way human beings treat one another.
Mihku, I, too, have faith in the content and simplicity of the work. Your poems sound important. Thank you of sharing your thoughts and your reaction to Guzlowski’s work.