Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win
With his 1990 debut novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, crime writer Walter Mosley introduced readers to a new kind of hard-boiled hero: a Black private eye navigating a racist world.
Sixty books and three decades later, Mosley, the first Black man to win the National Book Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, has published his latest novel, Every Man a King. This time the hero is a Black ex-cop named Joe King Oliver investigating a white supremacist.
“And it’s the same thing, right?” Mosley, 71, told me. “A Black detective in a racist world.”
Mosley’s mother, Ella Slatkin, moved from New York to LA after college and met Mosley’s father in a school where he was a custodian and she was a personnel clerk. Mosley grew up in LA surrounded by his mother’s extended family, all immigrants from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe.
“All of them were intellectuals,” Mosley said. “Most of them were Trotskyites — you know, Trotsky was Jewish. And of course they all spoke Yiddish.” But Judaism wasn’t a “religious thing that drove them. It was a cultural thing. It was also political, and so a lot of the ideas and the politics in my books come out of my mom and what she talked about living in America.”
Did his mother’s family accept him, a biracial boy? “There was never a moment where I felt ostracized or ignored,” he said. “I got along great with them, hanging out with them, doing things with them. They were wonderful.” He paused wistfully to remember his favorite, Uncle Chaim, 80 years old and 4 feet 9 inches, who’d been a tailor in the old country: “I just loved him.”
The food at those family gatherings was good, too. His mother’s cousin Lily made matzo ball soup, roast chicken and knishes — though in the cultural melting pot that was LA, she used wonton skins to wrap the knishes.
https://forward.com/culture/537025/walter-mosley-every-man-a-king-new-detective-novel-jewish-mother/
Sixty books and three decades later, Mosley, the first Black man to win the National Book Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, has published his latest novel, Every Man a King. This time the hero is a Black ex-cop named Joe King Oliver investigating a white supremacist.
“And it’s the same thing, right?” Mosley, 71, told me. “A Black detective in a racist world.”
Mosley’s mother, Ella Slatkin, moved from New York to LA after college and met Mosley’s father in a school where he was a custodian and she was a personnel clerk. Mosley grew up in LA surrounded by his mother’s extended family, all immigrants from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe.
“All of them were intellectuals,” Mosley said. “Most of them were Trotskyites — you know, Trotsky was Jewish. And of course they all spoke Yiddish.” But Judaism wasn’t a “religious thing that drove them. It was a cultural thing. It was also political, and so a lot of the ideas and the politics in my books come out of my mom and what she talked about living in America.”
Did his mother’s family accept him, a biracial boy? “There was never a moment where I felt ostracized or ignored,” he said. “I got along great with them, hanging out with them, doing things with them. They were wonderful.” He paused wistfully to remember his favorite, Uncle Chaim, 80 years old and 4 feet 9 inches, who’d been a tailor in the old country: “I just loved him.”
The food at those family gatherings was good, too. His mother’s cousin Lily made matzo ball soup, roast chicken and knishes — though in the cultural melting pot that was LA, she used wonton skins to wrap the knishes.
https://forward.com/culture/537025/walter-mosley-every-man-a-king-new-detective-novel-jewish-mother/