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The Sunset Gang: Stories of Love, Sex, and Joy in a Florida Retirement Community

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Overview

With time running short, the residents of Sunset Village, a Florida retirement community, prove that sex, love, intrigue and vitality continue to salt the so-called golden years. These acclaimed and timeless short stories have become a primer for the twilight years and a message of hope for a rich extended life in today's world. Sunset Village's intrepid inhabitants continue to thirst for life and love, teaching us all a lot about living--a subject on which they are, after all, experts. A three hour mini-series on PBS's American Playhouse, starring Uta Hagen, Harold Gould, Doris Roberts, Anne Meara, and Jerry Stiller.

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Author Information

Bio of Warren Adler

Warren Adler is a world-renowned novelist, short story writer and playwright. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages and two of his novels, The War of the Roses and Random Hearts, have been made into enormously popular movies, shown continually throughout the world. Three short stories from his acclaimed collection The Sunset Gang have been adapted as a trilogy and shown on Public Television stations. The Overlook Press will publish a new novel, his 29th, in Spring 2008, and his fifth short story collection, New York Echoes will be published in late Winter of 2008 by Stonehouse Press. His play Libido is scheduled for an off-Broadway production in 2008. His stage adaptation of the novel The War of the Roses is currently being produced in Italy, Berlin, Hamburg, Prague and countries in Scandinavia. Mr. Adler is a pioneer in electronic publishing and has acquired his complete backlist and converted this entire library to digital publishing formats. As a novelist, Mr. Adler's themes deal primarily with intimate human relationships--the mysterious nature of love and attraction, the fragile relationships between husbands and wives and parents and children, the corrupting power of money, the aging process and how families cling together when challenged by the outside world. Readers and reviewers have cited his books for their insight and wisdom in presenting and deciphering the complexities of contemporary life. A product of the New York public school system, Mr. Adler graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School and New York University, where he majored in English literature. Inspired by his freshman English Professor Don Wolfe, Mr. Adler went on to study creative writing with Dr. Wolfe when he taught at the New School. He also studied under Dr. Charles Glicksburg at the New School. Among his classmates were Mario Puzo, William Styron and many other talented writers. Two collections of short stories "American Vanguard" and "Which Grain Will Grow" were published by Doubleday and represented a showcase of many young emerging authors, who like Warren Adler, won both popular and critical acclaim. "I wanted to be a novelist since I was fifteen years old," he says. "Throughout my early career, I would write from five to ten in the morning every day before going to my office, a habit that has stayed with me since." After graduating from New York University with a degree in English literature, Mr. Adler worked for the New York Daily News before becoming Editor of the Queens Post, a prize winning weekly newspaper on Long Island. His column "Pepper on the Side" became a staple of a number of newspapers in the country. During the Korean War, after basic training he was recruited by Armed Forces Press Service to serve in the Pentagon as the only Washington Correspondent for the service. His Washington by-line went all over the world and was published in every publication put out by the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard. Prior to his success as a novelist, Mr. Adler had a distinguished business career. He has owned four radio stations and a TV station, has run his own advertising and public relations agency in Washington, D.C. and was one of the founders with his wife Sonia and son David of the Washington Dossier magazine. When his first novel was published in 1974, he became a full time novelist. Today, when not writing, Mr. Adler lectures on creative writing, motion picture adaptation and the future of Electronic Books. He is the founder of the Jackson Hole Writer's Conference and has been Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Jackson Hole Public Library. He is married to the former Sonia Kline, a magazine editor. He has three sons, David, Jonathan and Michael and four grandchildren and lives in New York City.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Stonehouse Press

Filesize

401.32 KB

Number of Pages

208

eBook ISBN

1590062086

Excerpt from: The Sunset Gang by Warren Adler

From "Yiddish"
When it was first organized, the Sunset Village Yiddish Club met once a week. Members talked in Yiddish, read passages from the Yiddish papers to each other, and discussed, in Yiddish, the works of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer that they had read during the week -- in the original Yiddish, of course. The members enjoyed it so much that they would sometimes stay in the all-purpose room in the Sunset Village Clubhouse, where the meetings were held, for hours after they were over, talking in Yiddish as if that language were the only logical form of communication. Finally they had to increase the meetings of the Yiddish Club to three times a week, although most of the members would have preferred to attend every day.

There were a great many reasons for the phenomena, their club president would tell them. His name was Melvin Meyer, but in the tradition of the club, he was called Menasha, his name in Yiddish. He had a masterly command of the Yiddish language. Both his parents had been actors in the heyday of the Yiddish stage, when there were more than twenty Yiddish theaters on the Lower East Side of New York alone and they were showing at least three hundred productions a year.

"There is, of course, the element of nostalgia," Menasha would explain to the group pedantically, his rimless glasses imposing in their severity. "It is the language of our childhood, of our parents and grandparents. To most of us it was our original language, the language in which we first expressed our fears, our anxieties, our loves, and the language in which our parents forged our childhood. The link with the past is compelling. And, naturally, there is the beauty of the language itself -- its rare expressiveness, its untranslatable qualities, its subtlety and suppleness -- which makes it something special simply in expressing it and keeping it alive."

To both Bill (Velvil) Finkelstein and Jennie (Genendel) Goldfarb, Menasha's words were thrilling, but merely suggestive of the depths of their true feelings. They had joined the club on the same day and, they discovered later, for the same reasons, some of which Menasha had expressed. Their respective spouses had lost the language of their forebears and showed absolutely no interest in the activity as a joint marital venture. Besides, they were much more disposed to playing cards and sitting around the pool yenting with their friends.

Because they had joined on the same day, they had, out of the kinship of newness, sat next to each other and were able to start up a conversation on the subject of their first day at the club.