Barry Elkin

Elkin is one of Sam's mentors and a local writer on the Lower East Side. Sam meets him while trying to get a job through cold-calling (you know how bold he can be! He knocked on every door in almost every building on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side) after he leaves law school.

Born Boris Meirovich Elkin in the 1870s, Elkin had immigrated from the Russian Empire to the Lower East Side of New York City at the tender age of twelve. One of the lucky few of his generation to “make it” as a writer and academic, Elkin was known in literary circles for the stark humanity of his characters, who tended to be on the mundane side of things. He didn’t write about heroes, revolutionaries, or superstars - he preferred housewives, insurance salesmen, chefs, deli owners, factory workers, and the unemployed as his protagonists. 

Set in Eastern and Central Europe - Warsaw, Lemberg, Odessa, Bucharest - and on the Lower East Side, his stories became known for blurring the distinction between reality and fiction and for their provocative ruminations on immigrant identity, love, death and life. Although Elkin’s first two novels were flops (according to literary critics, anyways), his third novel, Eurydice and Orpheus, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1920.

Despite his achievements, Elkin was, as he described himself, “a literary nobody” until the late 1920s, when he suddenly obtained nationwide fame for his provocative novel about life, death and desire, "Goodbye, Odessa."