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10/23/2024 08:30 AMAllan Appel hopes there is truth in the old adage that, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” This is why Allan and Melanie Greenhouse are bringing an afternoon of poetry by Palestinian and Israeli poets to the shoreline. Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek (CBSRZ) Arts Café’s “Readings of Israeli and Palestinian Poetry“ event will take place on Sunday, Oct. 27 at 3 p.m. at CBSRZ on 55 East Kings Highway in Chester.
The event’s organizers are poets themselves.
“In time of such suffering and grief and tortured feelings, people turn to writers,” Allan says. “The hope is that poetry helps everybody to keep their hearts open.”
Along with the poetry, there will be musical interludes provided by Walter Mamlock on clarinet and Robert Nasta on oud, a stringed instrument which is characteristic of Middle Eastern music.
The program is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. Register at cbsrz.org/cbsrz-arts-cafe or, for more information, call 860-526-8920. A suggested $15 voluntary donation at the door will go to Hand in Hand, an organization which supports bilingual Jewish-Arab education.
According to Allan, the poems chosen do not focus on blood, anger, and revenge. Instead, they emphasize three themes: love of the land, the history that is always a part of conflict in the Middle East, and paths which could lead to hope and reconciliation. There are, in all, 28 poems by 12 writers.
“All the poets are well known in their regions,” Allan says. “There is a long tradition of poetry in the Middle East. Poetry is much more important in the Arab world.”
The poems will be read by four members of the CBSRZ congregation. The program is part of CBSRZ’s ongoing Arts Café, which has also presented an afternoon of short plays by community members, as well as readings by local poets and authors.
Allan's collaborator, Greenhouse, was co-founder and the original director of the Arts Café-Mystic, presenting nationally known poets and local musicians when the series took place at the Mystic Art Association (now the Mystic Museum of Art). The series is now in its 32nd year at the La Grua Center in Stonington.
Allan has written not only poems, but he’s also penned novels and plays, as well. Often, his fiction involves what he describes as collisions between characters of different religions. One of his eight published novels, The Rabbi of Casino Boulevard, involves a rabbi who falls in love with a Japanese woman. It was a one of three finalists for the National Jewish Book Award.
Another novel, High Holiday Sutra, which won a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, centers on a Jewish-Buddhist romance; and Jewish-Mormon interaction is the subject of Allan’s novel, The Book of Norman.
In addition, Allan has written plays, one about Abigail Franks, a prominent colonial-era New Yorker; and another about Moe Berg, the professional baseball player who was also a World War II spy. His play about Anne Eaton, an 18th-century Puritan rebel who was persecuted for her non-traditional views, won the first Connecticut Heritage Plays Award.
Allan grew up in Los Angeles, coming to New York for college in a joint program with Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He has a master’s degree from the City University of New York.
When he graduated, Allan knew he wanted to be a writer. The question, however, was what to do to earn a living? He drove a taxi, and he worked at the admissions desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a time when the museum had just started charging admission, but there was no fixed fee. Rather, it was left up to individuals to pay what they wanted. Allan recalls friends who came and paid one cent and then demanded a receipt.
“It really gummed up the line,” he says. “It was activism. We were all young.”
The benefit for Allan at the museum had little to do with his work. Rather, it is where he met his wife, Suzanne Boorsch, an art historian who was working at the museum as a curator. They moved to Connecticut when Boorsch, originally from North Haven, got a position as a curator at the Yale Art Gallery, where she retired as the Robert L. Solley curator of prints and drawings. The couple have an adult son and daughter and two grandchildren.
Over the years, Allan has worked as high school instructor, a college professor, a substitute teacher, a foundation executive and, for the last 20 years, as a reporter for the New Haven Independent. Whatever else he was doing, he has always continued to write.
Allan says that his next book will be an historical novel about an attempt on the life of George Washington.
“Let’s say it could have happened,” he says.
The novel is timed to mark the semiquincentennial—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Allan adds that many of his latest short stories and poems have been published online.
The Oct. 27 program featuring Israeli and Palestinian poetry will not be the first time Allan is involved in such an event. He was one of three participants in an evening of poetry and prose by Ukrainian authors in 2022 in Hamden and was also involved with organizing a similar reading of Ukrainian authors at the Legacy Theatre in Stony Creek, Branford.
Allan hopes that the upcoming program of poetry will encourage some shifts, however small, in current attitudes.
“I want people to leave the reading with perspective, with some understanding they didn’t have when they entered,” says Allan.