Pearl Abraham is the author of the widely acclaimed, recently published novel, The Seventh Beggar, about which Harold Bloom wrote, “The Seventh Beggar is an amazingly poignant completion of the most enigmatic of Nachman of Bratslav’s tales. Rabbi Nachman listened for God’s voice in the void and was frighteningly honest as to how difficult it was to apprehend redemption. By a kind of miracle of sympathetic imagination, Pearl Abraham has been able to revivify what may be the most spiritually disturbing of all Chasidic tales.”
The Seventh Beggar is a finalist for the 2006 Koret Award in Fiction, along with David Grossman’s Her Body Knows and Francine Prose’s A Changed Man.
The Romance Reader, her first novel, was a finalist for The Discover New Writer’s award, named ‘Best Book of 1995’ by Library Journal, and selected as first title by Contra Costa Times of San Francisco. It was also on bestseller lists in Germany and The Netherlands. About Giving Up America, her second novel, one critic wrote “In spare prose, with painstaking attention to quotidian detail, the book magnifies the anticlimactic dissipation of love and unflinchingly dissects the familiar, and often irreconcilable tension between commitment and self-realization, daily partnership and romantic fantasy…A page-turner.”
Abraham is also the editor of the Dutch anthology Een sterke vrouw: Jewish Heroines in Literature (Meulenhoff, 2000). Recent essays appeared in Who We Are (Schocken Books), The Michigan Quarterly, and “Forward.” Recent short stories have appeared in “Epoch” (Cornell), “Forward,” and Brooklyn Noir (Akashic Press). Her story "Hasidic Noir," won the 2006 Shamus Award for Best Short Story About A Private Eye. Abraham teaches Literature and Writing at Western New England College in Springfield, MA. Her paper, “Trust the Tale: The Modernity of Nachman of Bratslav,” delivered at the 2003 MLA conference, can be read here
Abraham grew up in a Hasidic family, the third of nine children. She graduated from Hunter College and received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from New York University. She lives in Manhattan.