Pilcer, Sonia 1949-

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PILCER, Sonia 1949-

PERSONAL: Born February 3, 1949, in Augsburg, Germany; brought to United States, 1950; naturalized U.S. citizen, 1962; daughter of Benjamin and Lusia (Gradon) Pilcer. Education: Queens College of the City University of New York, B.A., 1970.

ADDRESSES: Home—Copake Lake, Columbia County, NY. Agent—Carl Brandt, Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc., 1501 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

CAREER: Ingenue, New York, NY, chief copywriter, 1970-71; Movie Mirror, New York, NY, managing editor, 1971-72; freelance writer, 1972—; staff writer for Manhattan Park West, 1975; teacher at Hebrew University, Israel, 1982-1983. Adjunct professor of journalism at City College of the City University of New York; lecturer and reader. Associated with WNYC-Radio and WBAI-Radio.

MEMBER: Poets and Writers, PEN, Writers Guild of America, Screenwriters Guild.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellowship from Yaddo, PEN, and MacDowell, all 1979.

WRITINGS:

Teen Angel (novel), Coward (New York, NY), 1978.

Little Darlings (novelization of film of same title), Ballantine (New York, NY), 1980.

Maiden Rites (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1982.

I-Land: Manhattan in Monologue, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1987.

The Holocaust Kid, Persea Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Author of unproduced screenplay "Teen Angel" based on her novel of same title, for Universal. Also author of script for television program Domestic Life. Poetry anthologized in Internal Weather: New Poems, New Poets, edited by Fred Wolven, Ann Arbor Review, 1976, and Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era, Ktav, 1977. Contributor of poetry to Centennial Review, Luna, Smith, and Village Voice; also contributor to essays, articles, and fiction to Forward, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, and Movie Screen.

SIDELIGHTS: Named one of the "new literary lionesses" by Cosmopolitan in September 1982, Sonia Pilcer has become known for her sensitive and frank accounts of the adolescent struggle to come of age. The main characters of her first two novels are young, middle-class Jewish women who reside in New York City. Pilcer depicts their painful passage through the sexual revolution of the 1960s. As Harriett Gilbert wrote in the New Statesman, the author takes the reader on "a journey through the minefields of sex, love and parental confrontation to womanhood." Pilcer's focus, said Cyrisse Jaffee in School Library Journal, is on "the raunchy humor and the tough but vulnerable stance of adolescents."

In Teen Angel, for example, the reader follows the physical and emotional growth of Sonny Palovsky from her initiation into the local gang, the Teen Angels, through the various situations that she and the other gang members experience on their road to maturity. Anne Roiphe wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Teen Angel is "a mixture of raw, childish vulgarity with real growing pains and honest expectations of love and happiness." Maiden Rites, on the other hand, is the tale of eighteen-year-old Hannah Wolfe, a college student who is unhappy with her life and is looking for an ideal love. According to a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, "the story is about being a young woman caught in the changing social tides of the late 60s." And Joan Kapstein described the book in Library Journal as "a very funny novel of first romance.... [Pilcer] wonderfully depicts Hannah's striving for instant adulthood amid watchful, disapproving parents; commuter romance; and other trials of teenage life in the big city."

Pilcer once told CA: "I don't write for younger readers specifically, although I'm pleased that they do seem to respond to my work. What I do attempt to reach is the hard kernel of innocence, embarrassment, shame, joy, stirrings of the memory, and ideals in my readers which are often associated with youth."

In 1982, while teaching in Israel, Pilcer began writing a work that became the collection of stories, The Holocaust Kid, a witty, acerbic take on the problems of 2G, Pilcer's flip designation for the children of Holocaust survivors, the second generation. Herself a member of 2G, Pilcer has written a series of autobiographical stories in which the problems of her generation are highlighted, for the ordinary trials and tribulations of growing up in America are always set against the scrim of the extraordinary pains of what the parents have survived. Thus, when the young Zosha Palovsky, Pilcer's protagonist/alter-ego throughout the stories, dismays her father by wearing a tight skirt and too much make-up, he questions aloud why he survived Auschwitz. Other stories detail Zosha's sexual escapades, including an affair with a man dubbed a "Shoah Casanova," and another who has flirted with neoNazism. Seth Rogovoy described Pilcer's style in the Berkshire Eagle as "Elie Wiesel shot through with a heavy dose of Henry Miller and a little bit of early Philip Roth for good measure."

"Wit and humor interlace with stark realities and unanswerable questions as Zosha looks for a way to celebrate life and remember the past," remarked Karen Simonetti in Booklist. Thus, in addition to teenage rebelliousness and the sexual revolution, Zosha confronts the offensive ways in which some have attempted to honor or memorialize the Holocaust dead, inadvertently trivializing or sentimentalizing what defines her, even if she didn't live through it herself. Finally, Zosha comes to some level of peace with herself and the world, partly through the birth of her own child, and seeing her parents' love for their grandchild. "Unlike the majority of books in the increasingly common genre of linked stories revolving around a single character, The Holocaust Kid has the scope and progression and emotionally satisfying resolution of a novel," remarked Jane DeLynn in the Women's Review of Books.