Leslie Epstein, a celebrated novelist and revered writing teacher who was born into Hollywood royalty — his father and uncle collaborated on the script for the classic 1942 film “Casablanca”— died on May 18 in Boston. He was 87.
His wife, Ilene, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was complications of heart surgery.
The best known of Mr. Epstein’s novels was “King of the Jews” (1979), a powerful, biting and at times humorous story about the leader of a Judenrat, or Jewish Council, in a Polish ghetto during the Holocaust.
Councils of elders, which were established by the Nazis to run the ghettos, provided basic services to the Jews who were forced to live there; they also had to make the morally fraught decision to provide their occupiers with lists of Jews to deport to labor and concentration camps. When Adam Czerniakow, the leader of the Warsaw council, received an order to round up Jews for deportation, he apparently chose to end his life rather than obey.
Isaiah Chaim Trumpelman, the protagonist of “King of the Jews,” was modeled on Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the megalomaniacal leader of the Jewish Council in Lodz, Poland. The character of Mr. Rumkowski had resonated with Mr. Epstein since he read a single paragraph about him in a book about the Holocaust in the 1960s.
“He rode around with his lion’s mane of hair and his black cape, put his picture on ghetto money (to buy nothing) and ghetto stamps (to mail nowhere), and decided which of his fellow Jews should or should not be sent to death.” Mr. Epstein wrote, about Mr. Rumkowski, in an essay for Tablet magazine in 2023.
Writing about “King of the Jews” in The New York Times Book Review, Robert Alter praised Mr. Epstein’s focus on “the morally ambiguous politics of survival” practiced by Council leaders “who were both violently thrust and seductively drawn into a position of absolute power and absolute impotence in which no human being could continue to function with any moral coherence.”
Writing in The San Francisco Chronicle, the poet and novelist William Abrahams called it “one of the most remarkable books ever written about the Holocaust.” The Times included it on its list of the best books of 1979.
But the critic Anatole Broyard, also writing in The Times, echoed criticism about the novel’s tone, saying that the Jews in the novel “come very close to appearing silly or childish.”
“Many of them,” he said, “are manic, as if manic behavior were the Jew’s cliché, as if he is shrill, excitable, the stand-up comic, the nudnik of history.”
Mr. Epstein did not define himself as a Jewish writer (he was not religious), but several of his stories and novels focused on the tragicomic adventures of Leib Goldkorn, a Holocaust survivor, flutist, roué, schlemiel, contemporary of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and lover of Hustler magazine.
Goldkorn appears in “The Steinway Quintet: Plus Four” (1976), which contains the title novella and short stories; “Goldkorn Tales” (1985) and “Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail” (1999), two collections of novellas; and “Liebestob: Opera Buffa With Leib Goldkorn” (2012), a novel.
Explaining why he resurrected Goldkorn in “Ice Fire Water” after a 14-year absence, Mr. Epstein told Newsday in 1999 that “his voice kept speaking to me.” And in the long interim between books, Goldkorn’s motivations had changed.
“The fight against old age drives him,” Mr. Epstein said. “In ‘Goldkorn Tales,’ it had been music and his magic flute. But in this book, it’s the unsublimated Goldkorn, and his phallus has taken the place of his flute.”
To promote “Ice Fire Water,” Mr. Epstein paid for a series of playful classified ads that appeared on the front page of The Times. Some were intended for Michiko Kakutani — The Times book critic who had praised “Goldkorn Tales” — but only one of those was published: “DEAR SWEET MISS MICHIKO K. — Call your Leib Goldkorn.” Ms. Kakutani objected and asked The Times’s advertising department to quash the other ads that were to include her name.
When he wrote about the ads in Tablet in 2022, Mr. Epstein asked: “In the history of Western literature, has a character fallen in love with his critic? Leib Goldkorn did, at the age of 97. And how could he not?”
Leslie Donald Epstein was born on May 4, 1938, in Los Angeles, and grew up in a large house purchased from the actress Mary Astor. His father, Philip, and his father’s twin brother, Julius, were known for their wit and for the screenplays they wrote, including “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” “Arsenic and Old Lace” and “Casablanca,” (which they wrote with Howard Koch, and which earned the three of them an Oscar.
Jack Warner, the president of Warner Bros. Studios, feuded with the Epstein brothers and named them as subversives to the Communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee. When the committee asked the Epsteins to answer a questionnaire that asked if they had ever belonged to a subversive organization, they said they had: Warner Bros.
Philip Epstein died in 1952 when Leslie was 13. His mother, Lillian (Targan) Epstein, who was a distant figure in Leslie’s life, became a social worker after her husband’s death. She died in 2000, three days before Julius.
Leslie Epstein received a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University in 1960; studied anthropology as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford; and earned a master’s degree in theater arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1963, and a Ph.D. in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1967.
He had already begun teaching English at Queens College in 1965. While there, he met Ilene Gradman, a student, and they married in 1969.
In 1978, he moved to Boston University, where he directed the creative writing program for 36 years. His students included Jhumpa Lahiri, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for “Interpreter of Maladies,” a collection of stories, and Ha Jin, whose novel “Waiting” won a National Book Award in 1999.
Ms. Lahiri said in an interview that Mr. Epstein carefully analyzed his students’ stories in single-spaced reviews, a page or two long.
“He was honest, sometimes to the point where it was hard to absorb the impact,” she said. “But he would tell you why something was false and pinpoint what was off about it. You never approached your work in the same way.”
He taught his last class during this year’s spring semester.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Epstein is survived by his daughter, Anya Epstein, a television producer; his sons Paul, a high school social worker, and Theo, who, as general manager, helped lead the Boston Red Sox to the World Series championship in 2004, the team’s first in 86 years; six grandchildren; and a brother, Ricky.
In 2003, Mr. Epstein excavated his family history for “San Remo Drive: A Novel From Memory,” five interrelated stories about the Jacobis, a Hollywood family. The father, Norman, a producer and writer, and the mother, Lotte, were both modeled on Mr. Epstein’s parents. Richard, a painter, is Mr. Epstein’s fictional stand-in, and his brother, Barty, is modeled on Ricky.
In one scene, Mr. Epstein dramatizes the moment when Jack Warner named his father and uncle as subversives by having Norman testify in a televised hearing. When he says that Warner Bros. is the treasonous organization he belonged to, someone shouts, “Oh my God!” But many others laugh.
After being castigated by a committee member for his impudent wit, Norman apologizes, but he continues to be bait the panel. When he is pressed to name names, as witnesses typically were, he unfolds a piece of paper and gives the names of members of the committee.
With the room in an uproar, Norman adds, “Oh, I can do better than that,” He then names a few more members in the room.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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