Sender Zeyv, author of ‘Every Man A Slave,’ ‘Aleph Shin’, and the upcoming ‘Ten Lost’

Elliot Resnick writes:

What would your response be to those who find too much violence in your books?

"You know I try to write a little bit realistically. When you’re talking about war, there’s violence. Wars have violence, that’s the metzios. If you want to talk about a war and not mention anything about violence, it’s not a war. War is hell, what could I tell you. I’m not trying to sugar coat. I do a little bit, I took out some of the violence. [The version of Ten Lost] that you read has much less violence than the original version."

[Zeyv had sent me an unfinished version of the book — E.R.]

Why don’t other rabbis write works of Jewish fiction? Do you think they should?

"They do write them but they write them under pseudonyms like I did. They don’t really want people to know who they are. There are talmidei chachamim in Israel and in America who have written novels that I know of. I’m not going to tell you who they are."

During our conversation in relation to Every Man A Slave, Zeyv spoke about Jesse Jackson:

"Jesse Jackson was from my neighborhood in Chicago. He built this army of arrogant and defiant people who just wanted to get back at “whitey” instead of taking advantage and trying to become part of the American dream. The first thing that I remember him doing was lead protests in front of white- and usually Jewish-owned businesses that served black neighborhoods.

"Now these stores hired mostly blacks, catered to black tastes, and did not rip them off. But Jesse Jackson said they have to be black owned and encouraged people not to buy from them.

"That was the beginning of his career as a race hustler. And that is the kind of leadership that the blacks have. Whenever they have a promising leader who could really do something for them, the Jesse Jacksons of the world call them Uncle Tom and destroy their reputation in the eyes of the greater black community."