Biography

Through her long professional career, Toronto-born author Marianne Langner Zeitlin has worked as a novelist, journalist, book critic, public relations director of the Theatre Guild–American Theatre Society and the manager of the Clarion Chamber Orchestra.

Her latest novel, MOTHERLESS CHILD, which is set in the world of classical music, was short-listed for the 2012 ForeWord Book of the Year Award, and garnered several other prizes. NEXT OF KIN explores one family’s tragic experiences after the narrator’s sister is killed by a drunken driver. Her first novel, MIRA’S PASSAGE, encompasses the sweep of twentieth-century history as seen through the lives of an American journalist and an Israeli naval commander.

Zeitlin’s short stories and essays have appeared in Passager, Aethlon Lilith, Jewish Fiction.net, Scribblers on the Roof,  Sh’ma, and elsewhere, and two articles have been anthologized.  A recent short story, “The Desecration of the Sabbath,” which was published in Fiction Fix, was nominated for the Pushcart and American Best Short Story Awards Series for 2012.

Zeitlin has also written two plays. A Letter to Doris Lessing, staged at the Rochester (NY) Public Library and elsewhere, is a one-woman show in which a Santa Barbara socialite imagines herself inhabiting the life of the English writer. The action of the The Red Kit Case takes place in the course of a single day when a twenty-year-old girl leaves her Orthodox Jewish home in Toronto to move to New York.

The author’s parents were both descended from renowned dynastic rabbis, tracing their lineage back to the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism in the early eighteenth century. Her father, Rabbi Mordecai Langner, was the only rabbi of the oldest synagogue in Toronto, the Junction Shul, which celebrated its centennial in 2011.

Zeitlin is the mother of two children, Rabbi Hillel Zeitlin and Leora Zeitlin, grandmother of six, and the widow of violinist Zvi Zeitlin. She travelled widely with her husband on concert tours, befriending many of the outstanding musicians, composers and conductors of the 20th century. During their years in Rochester, NY, and summers in Santa Barbara, CA, Zeitlin also pursued — in addition to her writing career —her other passions of interior decorating, antique-collecting, cooking and daily swimming.

 

Book-signing for Mira’s Passage at Park Avenue Bookshop, Rochester, NY. 
The chocolate version of “Marianne’s Passage” was not for sale!

© 2014-2015 Marianne Langner Zeitlin