Elan Barnehama’s “Escape Route” Is a Jewish-American Teenager’s Coming-of-Age Story in the Tumultuous late 1960s

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In this episode 293, we visit with Elan Barnehama, author of “Escape Route,” a novel set in New York City during the tumultuous late 1960s, where the protagonist is a young Jewish teenager coming to terms with the world around him.

The novel is told by teenager, Zach, a first-generation son of Holocaust survivors, and NY Mets fan, who becomes obsessed with the Vietnam War and with finding an escape route for his family for when he believes the US will round up and incarcerate its Jews. Zach meets Samm, a seventh-generation Manhattanite whose brother has returned from Vietnam with PTSD which results in his suicide. Together, Samm and Zach explore protest, friendship, music, faith, and love during a time littered with hope and upheaval around the globe. Escape Route seeks to keep the terms ‘in-country,” and ‘the world,’ in our national conversation.

Frye Gaillard, author of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, an NPR Great Read 2018, says of the book: “This is a beautifully rendered novel, populated by unforgettable characters in an unforgettable time. Barnehama is a literary craftsman at the top of his game. Superb.”

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About the Author:

Elan Barnehama’s second novel, Escape Route (May 2022, Running Wild Press), is set in NYC during the late 1960s. His words have appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Entropy, Rough Cut Press, Boston Accent, Jewish Fiction, HuffPost, the New York Journal of Books, Public Radio, and elsewhere. He was a presenter at the 2019 Boston Book Festival, a Writer-In-Residence at Wildacres, NC, and Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts, Fairhope, AL, and the fiction editor at Forth Magazine LA. He earned an MFA from UMass, Amherst where he worked with George Cuomo and John Edgar Wideman.

Elan has taught college writing, has worked with at-risk youth, coached high school baseball, had a gig as a radio news guy, and did a mediocre job as a short-order cook. He’s a New Yorker by geography. A Mets fan by default.

Additional Praise for the book:

With nearly incandescent prose, Barnehama deftly stitches the reader’s heart to his glowing characters, then gently tugs and tugs and tugs—

— Marvin J. Wolf, author of Abandoned In Hell, and They Were Soldiers, also a motion picture.

The novel is totally charming, completely engrossing, moving, real. I love those characters- Zach, because of his way of throwing out those witty remarks and he has so much heart and courage. And Samm, because she is so cool, and holy smokes if I could only have been anything like her at that age. And the grandfather, of course.”

— Kiki Smith, Professor of Theatre, Smith College, Obie Award winner for Costume Design

“A precocious adolescent boy comes of age in New York in the tumultuous late Sixties in Elan Barnehama’s poignant novel about youth and friendship and social unrest. Barnehama deftly links the upheavals of the day to his parents’ dark past as Holocaust survivors. The Vietnam war bleeds onto the streets, peril is everywhere, but so is hope. Escape Route is a celebration of friendship with a Sixties soundtrack and youthful yearning for a better world at a time when Dylan was pitching, with ‘Hendrix at short.’”

– William Luvaas, author of The Seductions of Natalie Bach and Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle, the Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year

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