Jerome Mandel

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, moved to Israel in 1978, and lived in Tel Aviv when I was in Israel and in London when I was in England. In 2015 I moved to a house beneath the trees beside a lake in the mountains of western North Carolina.

In my academic life, I was sometime Chair of the English Department at Tel Aviv University and am now Professor Emeritus. I published four books on medieval English literature and thirty scholarly articles, and gave a hundred public lectures and fiction readings on four continents. I’m still an active scholar.

In my life as a creative writer, I won first-place in the P.E.N.-UNESCO International Short Story Competition for 1997 for ‘Third Time, Ice Cream.’ The prize was $3000. My daughter said that made the story worth its weight in gold. Actually, considering the price of gold at that time and the story single-spaced on 80 gram paper, the story was worth four times its weight in gold.

My stories have appeared in The Missouri Review; Other Voices (University of Illinois—Chicago); Short Story International; War, Literature, and the Arts; PEN-International; PEN-Israel; arc–The Journal of the Israel Association of Writers in English; Galaxy; Kibbutz Trends; and Nativ (in Hebrew). Other stories have appeared in e-zines: The Morpo Review; A Writer’s Choice Literary Journal; and Eternity.

My fiction has recently been published by Ang-Lit Press in Tel Aviv Short Stories (2009), Israel Short Stories (2011), and Love in Israel (2013). The Israel Federation of Writers Unions published my collection of short stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay: 18 Stories of Israeli Experience (1999) which is available on Amazon. My latest book of short stories is Covet the Oven (2013).

Photo credit: Sasha Gefen