J.’s coverage of books is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
Secrets, truths and love intertwine in B.V. Glants’ novel, “Half Notes From Berlin,” the winner of this year’s Cowan Prize.
The Anne and Robert Cowan Writer’s Prize recognizes Bay Area writers who have made an “exceptional contribution to literary arts through a uniquely Jewish perspective” and comes with $5,000. (J. editor-in-chief Chanan Tigay won the prize in 2020 for “The Lost Book of Moses” and served on the selection committee for this year’s prize.)
Ariel Resnikoff’s 2020 book of poetry, “Unnatural Bird Migrator,” won this year’s second-place award. Resnikoff of El Cerrito teaches Jewish studies at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco.
The two winners of the prize — established in 2004 at the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund — will be honored at a June 9 reception.
Glants’ 2022 novel tells the story of 15-year-old Hans in Germany of 1933, as Nazi ideology seeps into his school and everyday life. Against this backdrop, Hans falls in love with a Jewish classmate while discovering his own hidden Jewish heritage — and has to make a choice.
Glants, a Palo Alto resident, told J. that the novel was sparked by a chance encounter with a nonfiction book about German soldiers during the Nazi era with Jewish ancestry. He began to think about dual identities and how morality is entangled with emotion.
“The moment that you love somebody who has a strong identity, you have to accept their identity and, if you have, you’re faced with a choice,” said Glants, 42. “Am I for this, or am I against this? Because I cannot be neutral and still love them.”
Glants’ personal history was also a source of inspiration for the novel, albeit not directly. Like his main character, he has multiple identities that have shaped him.
“I was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in Donetsk and came here in the ’90s,” he said. “So thank you to American Jewry for helping us immigrate!”
He was 10 when he came to the U.S., young enough to adapt but old enough to remember his foundational experiences in the Soviet Union. Literature came with the family.
“I remember one of the things that we carried with us was the 1,000-plus books,” he said. “I grew up surrounded by Russian literature.”
In spite of that, Glants went into tech — a dependable path. He was successful but didn’t feel fulfilled.
“As soon as I got my CS [computer science] degree and got my first job, I was like: OK, something’s missing,” he said. “I need to do something that is more creative as well.”
Glants’ answer was to earn a master’s in writing at the California College of the Arts. He has also continued working in tech. He is co-founder and CTO of Turnkey, a tech staffing firm.
“Half Notes From Berlin” is not the first novel he’s written but is the first that’s been published.
It’s no accident he wrote a Jewish novel.
Jewishness and Jewish community are important to him, he said, especially because they were suppressed in the Soviet Union.
“The way that I describe Soviet Jewry is we had a Jewish exoskeleton, but that was primarily from the outside, [from] antisemitism,” he said. “There was nothing inside. There wasn’t a Jewish backbone.”
Since becoming involved in the Bay Area Jewish community, including sending his daughter to Jewish day school, he’s come to understand Jewish identity and community in a new way.
“It wasn’t just religious observance,” he said. “It was this sense of belonging, the sense of knowing that these are part of your tribe, and we are there for each other.”