As any writer will tell you, the publication of a book is an occasion for celebration—especially one that has been written and rewritten and agonized over for a decade. So it is clearly time for Leah Lax to celebrate the publication (on August 28) of her long awaited and compelling memoir, Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home.

Inprint’s connection to Leah and this book goes back many years. You might consider this “extra-textual”: it’s not in the book.

Sometime in early 1996, when I was still “the new guy” at Inprint, I received a phone call from Rosellen Brown, the acclaimed writer and faculty member at the UH Creative Writing Program (UH CWP). Rosellen had a friend in the Houston Hasidic community who was a school teacher and a talented writer. Inprint gave scholarships to Houston-area K-12 teachers to take our writers workshops. (Now we offer Teachers-as-Writers Workshops, essentially the same thing.) Rosellen wondered: Could her friend Leah receive a teacher scholarship?

Of course, I said—and the rest is history. Continue reading →