Avi Steinberg’s memoir of his time as a prison librarian is a catalog of juxtapositions. The product of a suburban modern Orthodox community and a graduate of Harvard, Steinberg seems an unlikely candidate for a rough Boston prison, where his primary companions are convicted criminals, among them addicts, pimps and rapists. Indeed, when he tells a former teacher, a rabbi, about the job, the rabbi is incredulous: Why would a good Jewish boy waste his time working in a prison? Yet it is precisely out of this strange meeting of worlds that Steinberg emerges as a thoughtful and gifted debut author.
In “Running the Books,” Steinberg uses his background as a mirror of sorts for exploring the realities of prison life and the inmates he comes across. The tragic hero of this book is Jessica, a hopelessly drug-addicted woman who has been in and out of prisons for much of her life. Jessica is extremely withdrawn, and it is only through another inmate that Steinberg learns what keeps her gazing out the window during his creative writing class: the chance to observe her grown son, whom she abandoned when he was just a toddler and who has turned up behind bars in the same prison as his mother — neither having seen the other since the initial abandonment more than 15 years prior. Slowly, gradually, Steinberg is able to tease out bits and pieces of her history from the tight-lipped Jessica, whose “tortured solitude” and “abyss of silence” remind the librarian of his own distant and difficult grandmother, Faye.
