arts & culture
Cheltenham Author to Publish
Debut Novel
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
20 MAY 19, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
period of American history, including
Prohibition and the Vietnam War, but
it also exposed as many holes in Joan’s
story as it sought to fi ll.

Sensitive to the nature of Joan’s
death, Brill opted to not contact Joan’s
remaining relative, her youngest
daughter, now 80 years old. She did,
however, meet with the archivist of
Friends’ Central School, where Brill
believed Joan attended. Th ere was no
record of Joan there, and no pictures
found of her during the entirety of
Brill’s research.

“We were looking through year-
books, and we found the yearbook
photos for her cousins and her father
and her aunt,” Brill said. “In other
yearbook years, there would have been
the underclassman photos as well, and
there were no photos of her, so that, to
me, is even more creepy.”
Instead of relying on Joan’s life to
guide the novel’s narrative, Brill used
Joan’s voice to explore what it meant to
be a young woman navigating a world
before a popular feminist movement.

Joan the character is family-oriented
but manipulative; she’s naive but devi-
ous all at once.

“Joan was an ordinary woman,” said
Anne Dubuisson, Brill’s developmental
editor for the book. “Even ‘ordinary
women’ — women who are not doing
those kinds of great gestures or great
Courtesy of Elise Levine Cooper
F or authors, ideas for a story
seem to come from thin air — a
spontaneous idea, a line from a
remembered conversation.

For Eileen Brill, the idea for her fi rst
published novel came from a hole in
her wall.

In 2007, while Brill was having some
electrical work done in her Cheltenham
home, the electrician pulled out a bat-
tered piece of paper from the wall in
the third-fl oor bedroom.

Th e electrician was about to throw it
out until Brill, with a hunch, grabbed
the piece of paper: a letter written
on personalized stationery with the
house’s address in the corner.

Th e Jewish author, 58 — also a writer,
painter and American Sign Language
interpreter — was fascinated by the let-
ter written by a young Quaker girl and
original resident of the house in the
early 1930s. She spent years on-and-
off researching the life and death of
the young girl, Joan, realizing that the
details of her life would make for a
potent novel.

“Th ere were just so many holes in
her life that I couldn’t fi gure out, and
I realized, ‘I think I have a skeleton of
a really good fi ctionalized story here,’”
Brill said.

Aft er 15 years of researching and
writing, Brill’s story has reached the
pinnacle of its life. Th e psychological
drama and historical fi ction novel, “A
Letter in the Wall,” will be released by
Sparkpress on May 24.

Brill is careful not to claim that
her novel is about the letter’s real-life
writer, but it is heavily inspired by her
life and death.

Th e real Joan was born in 1915 to
a wealthy Pennsylvania Quaker fam-
ily and suff ered loss at an early age
when her mother died of the 1918
Spanish Infl uenza, precipitating the
family’s move to the home in the early
1920s. Joan was murdered in 1971 in
Oklahoma City, days aft er she went
missing, a case that remains unsolved.

Brill’s research helped to contex-
tualize Joan’s story in a tumultuous
Eileen Brill is the author of “A Letter in the Wall,” her fi rst published novel.

actions that one normally hears about
in history — She’s an ordinary woman
whose story still deserves to be heard.”
Susan Weinberg, a friend of Brill’s
who read early draft s of the novel, found
that the book mirrored many of the
challenges of today. Brill gave a draft
of the manuscript to Weinberg in a
socially distanced drop-off in the early
days of the pandemic, when unknowns
about COVID stirred fear in so many,
not unlike Joan’s experiences surviving
a pandemic a century prior.

“I’m reading about this woman who,
in 1917, had the same experience in
what was going on,” Weinberg said.

Th ough “A Letter in the Wall” is a
commentary on feminism and history
through the lens of an author in the
21st century, Brill was careful not to
project too much of herself into the
book. A secular Jew married to the son
of Holocaust survivors, Brill decided
against having any Jewish characters
in her book, despite early readers ques-
tioning the decision.

“I was really aware that there were
no Jewish characters in my book,” Brill
said. “My character wasn’t interacting
— Jews weren’t part of her world.”
Joan was written by a Jewish author,
however, and her story is intertwined
with Jewish values Brill learned grow-
ing up.

“Th e whole slant of my story has a lot
of empathy in it, which I think is also
[in] my Jewish background, and caring
about others, viewing others through
that lens,” Brill said.

Brill will hold a signing for “A Letter
in the Wall” at the Rittenhouse Square
Barnes & Noble on June 4 at 4 p.m. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com



obituaries
Educator, Scientist Robert Bernoff
Dies at 89
HEATHER M. ROSS | STAFF WRITER
F ormer Penn State Abington
CEO Robert Bernoff, a devoted
scientist and educator, died on
April 18 at Jefferson Health’s Abington
Hospice at Warminster. He was 89.

Bernoff’s family said the son of
Russian Jewish immigrants dedicated
his life to science and to help the next
generation fall in love with learning.

“One thing which was very import-
ant to us (siblings) was that my father
was a scientist; he saw the world as a
place where, if you were rational about
things and careful in gathering evi-
dence, you could solve problems,” son
Josh Bernoff said.

He invested his time in his students
and took care in designing unique
lessons that would hook even the most
reluctant students in his introductory
chemistry course, Josh Bernoff said.

But his passion for connecting students
with the scientific world went beyond
the lecture hall.

After attending a lecture on science
education at the Franklin Institute, he
was motivated to join a committee creat-
ing new curricula for schools nationwide.

Bernoff’s lectures included lively
demonstrations and delved into rel-
evant and practical issues like global
warming. His passion for teaching
didn’t stop with college students; he
helped develop “Science: A Process
Approach,” a program that included
materials for children from kindergar-
ten through sixth grade.

He was interested in how people
taught science in elementary and high
schools and received grants to write the
science curricula for those students.

Bernoff served as the CEO of the
Penn State campus in Abington (for-
merly Penn State Ogontz) from 1979
to 1990. There he revolutionized the
role of the college and helped the cam-
pus evolve into what it is today, Josh
Bernoff said.

During his tenure, he granted a
bachelor’s degree to a student who
completed all the requirements at the
branch campus. Typically, the stu-
dent wouldn’t have been allowed to
Robert Bernoff
receive a degree at a branch campus,
so that was unprecedented and caused
conflict with the university adminis-
tration, Josh Bernoff said. Eventually,
Bernoff’s decision created a path that
allowed more students to complete
their degrees at branch campuses.

“He was committed to honesty and
fairness. Facts were important — you
make decisions by looking at facts. You
can’t understand my father without
understanding that that’s the way he
looked at the world,” Josh Bernoff said.

Bernoff was a trailblazer in more
ways, as the campus had the largest
minority population of Penn State’s
locations and won a disproportionately
large share of college teaching awards,
Josh Bernoff said
After he retired, Bernoff lectured at
senior living facilities, synagogues and
other places. He taught himself to use
computers and became skilled at mak-
ing engaging slide presentations.

While Bernoff was known publicly
for science and teaching, he was a sci-
entist in his private life, too. His curi-
osity led to several home improvement
projects, and he was described by Josh
Bernoff as a “DIYer.”
Photos courtesy of Josh Bernoff
Bernoff is also remembered for his
infectious, witty sense of humor.

“[My] father was fond of puns; he
got that honestly — his father was
also fond of puns. There were always
these little jokes, there was always the
possibility of jokes. I picked that up;
I’m fond of puns. My own son seems
to have the same thing going on. We
now have a four-generation legacy of
making puns,” Josh Bernoff said.

Bernoff was born on Jan. 11, 1933, in
Philadelphia to Saul and Eve Bernoff.

His parents were Jewish immigrants
who left Russia to escape pogroms.

Although not a synagogue member,
religion remained a part of his life,
“We always had Passover seders. We
used the Maxwell House Haggadahs,”
Josh Bernoff said. “At the end of the
seder, they would talk about how in
every age there’s a new realization of
new groups who are oppressed and a
new realization of what it takes to be fair
to them. We never thought of ourselves
as being people of Russian background.

Our identity was Jewish, and we were
taught to be very proud of that.”
Bernoff grew up in West Philadelphia
where he met his wife, Sandra, when
they were teenagers. They married in
1955 and later had three children: Josh,
Andrew and Marjorie.

They lived in apartments in
Philadelphia until they bought their
first home in Dresher; they later moved
to Elkins Park.

“The most important thing I learned
from my dad was how to love. Their
relationship was really mostly harmoni-
ous and supportive. That had a big effect
on me. When I was looking for roman-
tic relationships myself, I thought this is
the way it should be,” Josh Bernoff said
of his parents’ relationship.

Bernoff’s life inspired his children in
their professional pursuits, as all three
became educators to some degree.

Josh Bernoff went into the software
business and now gives lectures and
writes books for corporate audiences
on effective business writing. Andrew
Bernoff is a mathematics professor at
Harvey Mudd College in Claremont,
California, and Marjorie Bernoff
teaches preschool in Philadelphia.

Bernoff is survived by his wife, their
children and five grandchildren. JE
hross@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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