Beth Schorr Jaffe
Beth Schorr Jaffe was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1952, grew up in Canarsie on Avenue 'K', took the Avenue 'J' bus to Brooklyn College, and graduated with a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing. One day after graduation she married and continued writing her first novel, a painful autobiographical piece that she admits was best left in her computer.
While she wrote and raised her sons she spent time attending various Universities studying art history, interior design, and abnormal psychology, all lifelong interests.
Listing her most recent writing accomplishments:
Simon and Schuster published her essay "Pretty Enough" in the book Chocolate for a Teen's Soul, and then published her essay "Her Majesty's Muscle" in their book Chocolate for a Women's Dreams. Kalliope: a Journal of Women's Literature and Art published her short story, "Hard Shiny Message." Fairview Press published, "Walk Me into the Morning" in the book Women with Cancer and the People who Love Them and Haworth Press published an excerpt from her first novel STUCK (not yet released) entitled, "Transference" and a poem "Just One Question Doctor, About My Termination" in, the book Escaping the Yellow Wallpaper, and an Essay Under a Lead Tomb published in Cambridge Press/ Palliative care. All of which can be found on Amazon.
She is currently working on both her memoir, whose first chapter "The Glamorous Years" written about the years before she was three, was accepted for publication in The Rambler magazine and was in bookstores November 2008, and has completed a new historical novel, The Hoffman Affairs, was published in September, 2022. When she is not writing, Beth reads novels, memoirs, psychology, history, has volunteered as an ESL tutor, and volunteers with a community Hospice Care facility. She dotes on her grown sons, 3 grandchildren, husband and Havanese Stella.
Beth wrote her novel STARS OF DAVID after someone told her about the Jews in Shanghai during and following World War II.
THE HOFFMAN AFFAIRS is based on some actual events between the start of WWII, and 1960s life in NYC.
While searching the Montmartre Cemetery for his lost father’s grave, unaware of the concentration camps,Henri Hoffman, a Jewish Parisian boy of eleven, meets an orphaned German teenager named Monika.Monika has been separated from her parents since they attempted escape from Germany 4 months earlier. ing herself alive by "service\ing Gera\man soldiers.She is half Jewish and has been keeping herself alive by servicing the occupying SS. Though she is several years older then him, he eventually becomes old enough to begin an intimate relationship with her. Alone in occupied Paris, Henri allows the homeless girl to reside with him, and the two struggle together from 1942 through 1945. Eight years after liberation, the couple—along with their toddler, Jacqueline—joins Henri’s cousin, Manny Hoffman, an ex-GI, in New York City, where they’re welcomed in by his close-knit, gentle family: Manny’s wife, two sisters, and aspiring-actress niece. As the years wear on, the family fractures as familial relationships are sabotaged by the brutality of a haunted past—traumas that, by the 1960s, are feeding on the destruction of new generations.
