In the Vast Silence of Manhattan

Elisa Lerner was born in Valencia, Venezuela; her father had immigrated from Novoselitsa, a village in northern Bessarabia (formerly in Romania), and her mother had come from Czernowitz. In 1935, her family moved to Caracas. She is a practicing attorney, but has distinguished herself through writing. She writes mainly for the theater but has also produced essays, short fiction, and a novel. Lerner has written extensively on her Yiddish-speaking mother, on female pop-culture stars—among them Shirley Temple, Susan Sontag, Katharine Hepburn, Eva Perón, and Miss Venezuela—and on the experiences of women more broadly: puberty, maternity, marriage, and divorce. Jewish themes, in particular the issue of Jewish women, are more prevalent in her essays than in her plays. In 1999, she was awarded Venezuela’s National Prize for Literature.