To the world at large, Leonard Shlain — author of the brisk-selling new book “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image” — has become somewhat of a celebrity.
But to himself and his friends in the Jewish community, the 61-year-old Marin resident and chief of laparoscopic surgery at San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center, will always be “Lenny Shlain from Detroit.”
After the success of his controversial yet highly praised book, which has sold more than 50,000 hardbound copies since its fall release, Shlain found himself besieged with requests to speak to audiences at college campuses, churches and bookstores around the country.
Currently he is preparing to speak to an audience that is not only close to home but close to his heart: the Jewish community.
On Monday evening, Feb. 22 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Shlain will speak on “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess.” He is the first of a number of authors slated to talk at the JCC as part of its ongoing adult education classes.
The thesis of Shlain’s book, which will soon be published in English-speaking countries worldwide, is that the emergence of literacy led to the rise of patriarchal cultures, which in turn caused the demise of the matriarchy.
During his JCC talk, Shlain will further touch upon his theory that, contrary to popular belief, it was the ancient Heb-rews, and not the Phoenicians, who invented the alphabet.
“Textbooks traditionally cite the Phoenicians,” said Shlain, who has also written another popular book, titled “Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light.”
“But research has led me to believe that it was in fact the Hebrews who gave the alphabet to the Canaanites, who taught it to the Phoenicians and then transmitted it to the Greeks.”
Finding the time to research and write two books was not a problem, Shlain explained. “When you have this passion for something, you make the time for it.”
According to Shlain, most archaeologists acknowledge that the oldest alphabet discovered is the one found in the Sinai Desert.
“There is only one major event associated with the name `Sinai,'” writes Shlain in his book. “It was here that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments for the Hebrew people. It seems like an extraordinary coincidence and a striking intersection of myth and science that the oldest alphabet was found in the place where the seminal episode in the history of the ancient Hebrews occurred.
“It is not mere coincidence that the first book written in an alphabet is the Old Testament,” Shlain maintained.
Married to San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ina Gyemant, with three grown children from a previous marriage, Shlain recalled that when he first arrived in the Bay Area from the East Coast more than two decades ago, he was concerned that his children retain a sense of their Jewish heritage.
So he and a number of fellow Jewish physicians got together and created a group that met during the High Holy Days in the amphitheater on Mount Tamalpais. “We named it the `Synagogue Without Walls’ and it was packed year after year,” he remembered fondly.
It was around that same time that Shlain headed off to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, where he volunteered as a surgeon in a trauma unit in Tel Aviv.
Born in Detroit to Russian-immigrant parents, Shlain attended a yeshiva and grew up with a strong knowledge of Judaism. He was 8 when World War II ended.
“I will never forget when, after the war, my father took me to a theater where we saw a reel of the [concentration] camps. It showed how the Nazis used to make soap from the skin of Jews. Later that night I can remember sitting in the bathtub at home, just staring at my bar of soap,” he said.
“I asked myself `Why in the world would they want to turn me into a bar of soap? What did I do wrong?’ It really made a deep impact.”