Siam Spicy II a• Enjoy some dishes such as : PAD PRIK Stir hied with onion. green onion, green pepper. water chestnut, sweet basil & bean sauce chicken $8 25 On The Bookshelf PAD THAI Stir tried lice stock noodle will) shrimps. tofu. bean sprouts. salty radish, ground peanut. cot , & green onion $7.95 In her debut novel, author Marisa Kantor Stark into her heroine's haunted past. breathes r IWO MN MN NIS MI .. NMI NW MIN M NW MI NM III 20% Off dotal Dinner Bill I II dine in or carryout expires 10/31/98 not, good at lunch time II 1 I LUNCH Tues.-Fri. 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. DINNER Tues.-Thurs. 5:00 p.m.-9:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat. 5:00 p.m.-10:30 p.m. Sunday 5:00-10:00 Closed Monday 32425 Northwestern 111”. Farmington Hills, MI 48334 248-626-2092 WHERE EAST MEETS WEST N.77 7 Nights a Week Live Entertainment By Joe Annijo & Michael Krieger IT'S BACK! SUNDAY BRUNCH Buffet Style • 10:30 am - 2:30 pm s12": Featuring: Fresh Omelettes, o B r etex: $795 Children under 10 Fresh Shrimp, - Fajita Bar, All you are to eat. Excluding special holidays. FRIDAY & SATURDAY We welcome back Robert Kimoto. Tableside Cooking. *All specials not valid with any other discounts HAPPY HOUR MON-FRI 4-6 PM 935 W.11 Mile, exit 62 OFF 1-75 SE corner of 11 & 1-75 Reservations (248) 399-5960 Your Hosts: Bruno Ferguson and Chris Malfroid DMI ROIT JEWISH NEWS 10/9 1998 'TN 98 Detroit Jewish News CLASSIFIEDS GET RESULTS! Call (248)354-5959 4IP SUSAN SHAPIRO Special to The Jewish News n did a 20 - year - old col- lege student get inside the ow in Poland and also my husband's fami- ly was killed by the Hitlers. They took from us everything. The house, the store. Even the old people they took away. "'Bring us di _ e alt war, zum head of a 90-year-old they said. This is German: Schiessen,' Holocaust survivor living `Bring us fhe old people, so we can kill in a New Jersey nursing home? The them.'" author of the impressive debut novel Tobe followed orders, brought her Bring Us The Old People (Coffee- parents and in-laws to the train sta- House Press; $22.95), Marisa Kantor tion, then went into hiding with her Stark says she didn't have a choice. In her junior year as a creative writ-- husband, Saul. Both sets of parents perished at Auschwitz and all these ing major at Princeton University, years later, she still blames herself. Kantor Stark and. some.friends decid- Kantor Stark began writing a fic- ed to visit a local Jewish nursing home on Chanukah. There she met a 90- year-old woman named Tobe, Marisa Kantor Stark: 'My .,-----' who began to tell her life's parents would buy me blank story. books and I'd fill them As the friendly, fiercely with poems and stories in intelligent Tobe the tree house in our explained how she was back yard, book after born in a small village book." in Poland and barely escaped the Nazis, Kantor Stark says she tional account based on was mesmerized. She the fragments Tobe relat- returned to the nursing ed to her. When she home once a week with a showed it to her Princeton tape recorder. adviser, Russell Banks, he "Instead of studying or socializ- went nuts over the vivid, engross- ing with friends, I found myself ing voice and told her to "run with obsessed with Tobe's story. Her voice it. took me over," says Kantor Stark, now When Kantor Stark finished the 25. The thin, dark-haired and very manuscript, Professor Banks gave serious-minded author laughs when it to his agent, who sold it to asked if she has "an old head" that Coffee House Press. connected her to Tobe. Yet connected Since graduating from she was. Princeton, Kantor Stark has been Tobe's saga spanned her life in busy. She completed her master's Europe and her arrival in New Jersey degree at Boston University, after the war, where she and her hus- taught English to 7th- and 8th- band owned a women's dress shop. graders at a yeshiva and wrote Though her husband died of two children's books and anoth- Parkinson's disease, Tobe's focus was er novel (currently with her on deaths that•occurred half a century agent). before. She authored two plays, Like in Sophie Choice, Tobe was Naomi and Ruth and David, haunted by a decision she'd made dur- based on biblical stories, which ing the war. are being produced in As rendered in Bring Us The Old Vermont. People, the narrator, Maime, says: Recently married to her "The rest of my family what was still Princeton classmate, Adam Stark, an investment banker, Susan Shapiro recently completed a they hired a private Jeep to comic novel, "Tangle.'' take them through the Galilee while touring Israel on their honeymoon. The couple recently moved to Manhattan's Upper West Side. Their daughter's achievements don't surprise her parents, who live in Aberdeen, N.J. Her father is a profes- sor of sociology and her mother is a math teacher. Kantor Stark says she grew up in a Modern Orthodox home, "surrounded by books." She went to Rabbi Pesach Raymon Yeshiva 4 and Hillel High School. "I always liked to write," she says. "My parents would buy me blank books and I'd fill them with poems and stories in the tree house in our back yard, book after book." Since nobody in her family was directly involved with the Holocaust, she isn't quite sure where her intense attachment to Tobe came from. "She • felt a compulsion to tell me her story. Then I needed to tell it, too," Kantor . Stark says. In a poetic twist, her sister, Beth, a student at Princeton, has taken over Marisa's volunteer work at the same nursing home, where Tobe's health has been failing. "I don't think Tobe realizes Beth isn't me," Kantor Stark says. ❑ RP