Write
Like many writers, I’ve had a crazy quilt of jobs: public relations and fundraising for a hospice, promotion director for the San Diego public radio station, freelance journalism, teaching. For several years, I wrote articles for Advertising Age Magazine, where I became known as Queen of the Sidebar. Eventually I was able to focus on what I loved: fiction and dance journalism.
Thrilled by the renaissance of women mystery authors that began in the 1980s, I wrote a mystery. My five-book series, featuring public radio reporter Margo Simon, was published by Berkley. Then I wrote The Tin Horse, and it sold to Random House. I felt like I’d caught the brass ring.
I’ve written dance feature articles and reviews for the San Diego Union-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, High Performance Magazine, Dance Magazine, and the online site San Diego Story. And I’ve started dipping my toes into poetry.
Poetry
In the summer of 2020—that first pandemic year, the summer of horror at the killing of George Floyd—I found a program on Zoom that combined yoga nidra and conversations about racial justice. In one session, a speaker told a lyrical story about her ancestral home, the Philippines. She asked us: “What story, if told, would heal your motherland?” My immediate thought was, “I have no motherland.”
That evening was the Jewish holy day of Tisha B’Av, mourning the destruction of both the ancient temples in Jerusalem (said to have happened the same day, centuries apart)—part of a history of disasters and expulsions that turned my ancestors into wandering Jews. Tisha B’Av is also my grandmother’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of her death. I attended a Tisha B’Av ceremony on Zoom. Sitting on the floor, the only light a candle I’d lit for my grandmother, I wrote a poem. Others followed.
List of poems available online
Grand Aleinu for the Burning West
A Blessing for the End of Life
THE TIN HORSE
“Steinberg’s novel introduced me to a dramatic piece of L.A.’s history through the story of the Greenstein family, set in prewar Jewish Boyle Heights. Fascinating and meticulously rendered.”
– Janelle Brown, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything
In the stunning tradition of Lisa See, Maeve Binchy, and Alice Hoffman, The Tin Horse is a rich multigenerational story about the intense, often fraught bond sisters share and the dreams and sorrows that lay at the heart of the immigrant experience.
It has been more than sixty years since Elaine Greenstein’s twin sister, Barbara, ran away, cutting off contact with her family forever. Elaine has made peace with that loss. But while sifting through old papers as she prepares to move to Rancho Mañana—or the “Ranch of No Tomorrow” as she refers to the retirement community—she is stunned to find a possible hint to Barbara’s whereabouts all these years later. And it pushes her to confront the fierce love and bitter rivalry of their youth during the 1920s and ’30s, in the Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. MORE