Estéban's Dance

What if the skipper of the Pinta discovers an island in the Antilles and doesn’t tell Columbus about it? What if a Marine captain and a Navy rabbi take up residence there in 1898, if Che Guevara plays some baseball there in 1963 and a widowed director of cut-rate horror films, the son of a one-eyed Bronx cabbie, arrives in 1990 to film the revolution he believes is brewing there but discovers, instead, the Cornell roommates he hasn’t seen in 30 years, and one of them carries a gun?


ESTEBAN’S DANCE follows Sammy Bronx and his unconventional friends from college in the late 1950’s, to Seattle and Hollywood, to Florida during the Cuban missile crisis, and finally to the curious island of San Esteban, where an unfinished Soviet hotel crumbles on the beach and most of the islanders are named Gruenfeld and Flanagan.


The tales are inhabited by a tax attorney who encounters a Vietnam veteran who’s biking home from New York after 9/11, a little boy who is banished to a chicken farm during World War II, a physicist who discovers a dollar bill in a rain puddle and it triggers a torrent of memories, a documentary filmmaker who witnesses the death of two children in the back seat of an SUV, and an old black man who reflects on his working life in a factory loft in 1950s Manhattan.


These stories are all about fathers, sons and daughters, first love and final loss, choices made amidst the chaos of our lives. And they are about reaching out from loneliness for family of one kind or another.


About the Author


Jay S. Sherman was born in New York but spent some of his childhood on the Gulf coast of Florida and near an army post outside of Little Rock. He’s been a hotel waiter, a literacy teacher, a silkscreen dryer, a mailroom clerk, a newsreel cameraman, a hawker of libretti at an opera house, a commercial production assistant and a documentarian. A theater major at Cornell, he earned a degree in motion picture production at the NYU film school and was a working film editor for 25 years.