Stacy Nockowitz holds a copy of her middle-grade novel, “The Prince of Steel Pier,” after signing copies at the township library.
May marked Jewish American Heritage Month, and the Cherry Hill library held a number of events to celebrate, including a visit by author Stacy Nockowitz on May 28.
The talk – “Welcome home, Stacy Nockowitz: An Author Visit,” – was sponsored in collaboration with the Cherry Hill Education Association, which provided light refreshments and library media specialists from the township’s middle schools.
Nockowitz is a township native and graduate of East High who became a published author in 2022. A former language-arts teacher and school librarian, she has spent more than 30 years in middle-school education. It is one of the reasons she decided to write her novel, “The Prince of Steel Pier,” as middle-grade fiction.
Jasmine Riel is the teen librarian at the library and introduced the author.
“I’m very excited to introduce Mrs. Nockowitz, whom I first met around this time last year in May at the annual New Jersey Library Association Conference in Atlantic City …” Riel recalled. “I remember the moment she mentioned that she grew up in Cherry Hill, because all of the people that I sat with at the luncheon, their heads swiveled toward me because they all knew I worked at Cherry Hill.”
Nockowitz’s novel won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Middle Grade Literature and was named a Sydney Taylor Notable Book for 2023.
Her novel is about 13-year-old Joey Goodman, a Jewish boy working as a waiter-in-training at his grandparents’ kosher hotel who spends much of his time in August of 1975 on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. He finds himself in several dangerous situations following encounters with a mobster and his daughter.
“The book, though, really is about a boy trying to find his place in his big Jewish family and in the world, as kids do at that age,” the author explained.
Nockowitz began the talk with her childhood, one of the inspirations for her novel’s setting and background. She chose to set the book in the Atlantic City of the 1970s based on her own history and showed authentic pictures of her family from the time.
Her grandparents, like Joey’s, also owned and ran a kosher hotel on the Boardwalk.
“Atlantic City, which for decades had been this booming tourist destination, was actually decaying … in the 50s,” Nakowitz recounted. “Air travel became a more widely available mode of transportation for people going on vacation …. the luster of Atlantic City really wore off.”
She then addressed how mob crime and corruption became more prevalent in the city, at a time when old landmarks and family-run businesses were first being torn down and replaced with casinos.
“So in the mid-70s, Atlantic City was in this time of transition,” she noted, “a time of kind of trying to find itself. And it is the same for my lead character, Joey Goodman.”
Besides the setting, Nockowitz said other aspects of the book that were crucial for her to include were Jewish religious and cultural markers. In a scene with a rabbi in a synagogue for a kosher observance, Joey’s kippah and talk of religious holidays and services like Shabbat, Chanukah and Passover are all featured.
Cultural touchstones such as Yiddish words, Jewish foods, matriarchy and community insularity are also important details in the book.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t see any of this stuff in books,” Nockowitz acknowledged. “I didn’t see myself in books, in the books that I read … It was like Jewish writers for children didn’t exist.”
She went on to discuss Rudine Sims Bishop’s essay on what books for children should be: mirrors to see themselves, windows to see into and sliding-glass doors become a part of other worlds.
“Very few of those books that could act as windows and mirrors and sliding-glass doors existed unless a student picked up a book about the Holocaust,” Nockowitz explained. “Jewish main characters were pretty much absent.”
She then described difficulties for Jewish authors in today’s publishing world. Antisemitism was one issue brought up, as well as more recent concerns over boycotts led against Jewish authors who do not openly denounce Israel.
Nockowitz wrapped up the event by reading a passage from the book and signing copies, putting award stickers on them if they were not already on the covers of each child’s copy.
