Erika Hecht and Robert Boris Riskin Read at the East Hampton Library

On Monday night at the East Hampton Library, two writers from the Ashawagh Hall Writers’ Group read from their work. Every seat in the new Baldwin Lecture Center (named after the actor Alec Baldwin and his wife Hilaria, longtime supporters of the library,) was taken.

The outgoing founder and mentor of the Ashawagh Hall writers, Marijane Meaker, introduced Robert Boris Riskin and Erika Hecht, two members whose work as writers she has mentored. Ms. Meaker is a novelist and short story writer who has written more than 40 books under various pseudonyms, including Vin Packer and Ann Aldrich. The new leader of the Ashawagh Hall writers, Laura Stein, was also in attendance.

Robert Boris Riskin of Sag Harbor, kicked off the reading with a selection from his most recently published novel “Deadly Secrets.” The book is the third in a series starring Jake Wanderman, a widower and retired English teacher who is fond of quoting Shakespeare and has somehow fallen into the role of peripatetic sleuth. The passage was lively and full of rich characterizations of people and places. This is Riskin’s sixth book and like the previous novels East Hampton plays a recurring role in the plot. In the reading our hero, Wanderman, is looking for a good Jewish restaurant in Paris and rues the fact that Goldberg’s Deli in East Hampton isn’t an option.

The next selection was by Erika Hecht of Sag Harbor. She read from her work-in-progress, a memoir of the years when she was a girl living as a hidden child in Nazi occupied Hungary. Her prose is spare and wastes little time with adverbs and adjectives, concentrating instead on telling her story. The pacing is fast and the details myriad and told in the voice of a little girl who observes her mother sleeping with her father though they are no longer married, and who must confront the reality that the family’s secret existence depends on a weekly payment of cash to a local farmer. The selection straddles a period in time when Hecht was 9-years-old and the Russians move into the village in Hungary where the family lives in a small house at the mercy of a local farmer. Hecht has been working on the book since she began telling her story along with other “Hidden Children” in 1991. She is nearly finished with her manuscript.