‘Boy From the North Country’ Join Author Sam Sussman in Conversation with Cantor Dan Singer Tickets | Stephen Wise Free Synagogue

On March 26, the literary world will gather for the annual celebration of the Jewish Book Council and its National Jewish Book Awards. It is a moment of recognition, of honor, of spotlight. But Jewish storytelling has never really lived in the spotlight. It lives in what happens next.

On March 26, just hours after the awards ceremony, we will welcome Sam Sussman to Stephen Wise Free Synagogue for a live conversation about his book Boy from the North Country, a one of three finalists this year for both the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction and Debut Fiction. The timing is intentional. Because the real life of a book begins not at the gala, but in the room where it is opened, questioned, and shared.

Sussman’s book touches, in part, on the enduring cultural presence of Bob Dylan. And yet, it is important to say clearly what the book is not. It is not a book about Dylan. It is not an attempt to decode or define a famously private artist. Dylan remains, as he has always been, elusive by design. But his music does something else. It enters people’s lives. It becomes personal.

For Sussman, the question of Dylan is not the destination, but a doorway. A way into something far more intimate: a story about his relationship with his mother, about memory, loss, and the ways we make meaning out of what we carry. That distinction matters.

Because too often we approach works like this looking for answers to external questions. Who is this person really about? What is the hidden truth behind the narrative? But Sussman’s work invites a different kind of reading. Not outward, but inward. What makes a book linger is not simply its subject, but the moment in your own life when it meets you.

What made Sussman’s Boy from the North Country so personal and emotional for me is that, like him, I lost a parent to cancer at a formative moment. His mother, my father. He was living abroad, completing an M.Phil at Oxford. I was immersed in music, beginning to find my own voice.

Different paths, but a strikingly similar stage of life. That moment when you are just beginning to understand who you are, and suddenly the ground shifts beneath you.

Reading his work, I did not feel that I was uncovering someone else’s story. I felt that I was recognizing something familiar. The disorientation. The searching. The attempt to make sense of loss while still moving forward.

And perhaps that is why the book resonates as deeply as it does. Not because of any external connection, real or imagined, but because of its emotional truth. Because it captures something that so many people carry, even if they have never put it into words.

As a cantor, I spend much of my life exploring how words take on new meaning when they are heard, sung, and felt in community. For this conversation, I will be drawing on Dylan’s lyrics not as subject matter, but as provocation. As a way of opening questions rather than closing them.

A line of a song can do what a paragraph sometimes cannot. It can bypass explanation and land directly in experience.

We will use those moments not to analyze Dylan, but to reflect on the emotional terrain that Sussman’s book inhabits. The experience of personal loss. The complicated bonds between parent and child. The act of shaping lived experience into story, and story into something that others can recognize as their own.

In that sense, what Sussman has created is not simply memoir, and not simply fiction, but something in between. A weaving together of truth and imagination that mirrors the way memory itself works. Fragmented, interpretive, always in conversation with the present. There is something deeply Jewish about that kind of storytelling.

Our tradition does not insist on a single version of a story. It invites layers. It allows for multiple voices. It understands that meaning is not fixed, but discovered through engagement.

The Jewish Book Awards honor authors for what they have written. But the deeper work begins when those words are placed into conversation with others. That is what we hope to create on March 26.

Not a lecture, and not a performance centered on any one figure, but a shared exploration. A space where music can open memory, where literature can hold complexity, and where a personal story can resonate beyond itself.

Because in the end, the most powerful stories are not the ones that tell us who someone else is. They are the ones that help us understand something we already carry, but have not yet found the words to say.

Those who find themselves in New York in the immediate aftermath of the awards are invited to continue that conversation in person.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)