Conversation with Howard Langer, author of “The Last Dekrepitzer”
Please join us for an Online Only conversation with Howard Langer, author of “The Last Dekrepitzer”. The story is centered on a Polish Jew who is smuggled out of Europe after World War II in an American Army uniform. He settles in the South, Marries a Black woman, and plays the fiddle in several Blues bands.
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PUBLISHED ON THE LEWES LIBRARY WEBSITE
Join the Lewes Public Library, Seaside Jewish Community, and Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice online for a conversation withHoward Langer, author of The Last Dekrepitzer, winner of the 2025 National Jewish Book Award for a debut novel.
The fiddler busking in the Columbus Circle subway station in 1965 is the Dekrepitzer Rebbe, the sole survivor of the obscure Dekrepitzer Hasidic sect known before the war for its rebbes’ fiddling. The Last Dekrepitzer follows the life and spiritual quest of Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher a/k/a Sam Lightup, from his isolated shtetl in the mountains of southern Poland, where he is brought up to be the future rebbe, to the wharves in Naples, where he jams with Black soldiers waiting to ship home at the end of the war. Dressing him in the uniform and dog tags of an AWOL soldier, they smuggle him home to rural Mississippi. He lives for years among the Blacks, speaks Black English, preaches, and plays the blues with the Brown Sugar Ramblers trio. His marriage to a Black woman, Lula Curtin, legal by Jewish law though forbidden under Mississippi law, results in a cross burning that forces them to flee to Manhattan. He plays on the streets of Harlem and Midtown with the Reverend Gary Davis, the great blind guitarist whose mission is saving souls for the next world. Shmuel Meir’s devout wife, though she knows herself to be the Dekrepitzer Rebbitzen, is spurned by the Jewish community. Through it all, Shmuel Meir fiddles his prayers in defiance of God. But God gives the Dekrepitzer Rebbe no peace.
Howard Langer was born in New York and brought up on the west side of Manhattan. His father served on the U.S.S. Missouri and was present at the Japanese surrender in 1945. His mother taught reading in Spanish Harlem for over thirty years. Howard attended the City College of New York when its English faculty included, among others, William Gaddis and Joseph Heller. He obtained a teacher’s degree from the Greenberg Institute in Jerusalem where he had the opportunity to study under Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Appelfeld. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Toronto. He ultimately attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania where he has taught for the last twenty years. His law practice has specialized in protecting the vulnerable and his most notable case involved a class action that recovered $200 million from a bank that abetted fraudulent telemarketers who preyed on the poor and elderly. Howard and his wife live in Philadelphia. He has two adult sons.
We invite you to support the author by purchasing a copy of their book from Browseabout Books. Call-in orders are accepted at (302) 226-2665 or you can stop by the store to purchase a copy. For store hours, please visit their website. Each copy purchased comes with a signed bookplate.
