Adele Mendelson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and moved to San Francisco in 1964 when she was nineteen years old. She discovered herself in Haight Ashbury in the middle of the counter culture. Despite that, she managed to earn an M.A. degree and then had a twenty-year teaching career in the English Language Program at the University of California at Berkeley. She married, raised two children, and learned how to be a poet and a fiction writer. She now lives in a 1901 Victorian in Oakland, California. In the author’s words . . .This book, Sarah and Zari After the War, comes from a place deep in my Jewish DNA. My fictional self in this book (Sarah) is twelve years old when Zari Heller, a Holocaust survivor, comes to live in her family’s house in Cleveland, Ohio. It is1948, three years after the end of the Second World War.Sarah is fascinated by her new friend's mysteries and secrets and wants to know everything about her. As Zari describes her privileged life in pre-war Berlin and her experience during the war, Sarah opens to the world. For her part Sarah helps Zari survive her new life. The novel follows them as Sarah becomes an adult, and their relationship takes a different turn.The bones of this story are true to my life. The rest is how I imagined it to be.Living on Earth (New and Selected Poems)When I write a poem, I am searching for words to bridge the gap between your mind and mine. Our stories are uniquely personal but also universal. Some of my poems are true, others are fiction, but they all tell the story of what's happened to me on Earth – my reach for happiness, what I have loved, and what I have suffered.Poems are arrows that fly from heart to heart. They tell us that we are all companions in life, which gives us another reason to love each other. Finding words to share our humanity – that is the business of poetry. Other works of poetry by the author: Celebration of Myself Gardens, a Book of Poetry Only in a BodyWhat I’m writing now: “Becoming Anju: An American Woman in India”I fell in love with India when I traveled there in the 1980s. Decades later I still remembered the people I met in the villages, the smells of fresh-ground spices, jasmine, and mango. I remembered the sounds of the jungle, the temple bells, and the monsoon as it swept through the subcontinent. I wrote this novel to capture and hold all of those memories."Becoming Anju" is the story of a beautiful young woman traveling alone in India, frightened and miserable after having run away from her fiancé. She is trying to find her way back to the New Delhi airport so she can go home to Boston. Fate and circumstance intervene, and she embarks on the journey of her life.Read more about this authorRead less about this author