Today, October 28th, 2021 THE TRUE has her birthday.
The book launches in English and Romanian and I simply wish to thank the people who have supported it here with these quotes — from them. I am deeply grateful and hope their words inspire you to read the book.
"The True is a shocking testimony about a reality that we, those who live in Romania, still refuse to acknowledge...A lesson in sincere self-analysis, which also contains the truth about us here. It should give us the courage to tell more."
Istvan Teglas, Actor/artist, The National Theater, Bucharest
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“The True is Sarah Kornfeld’s personal exploration of grief and loss. What begins as an examination of a long-ago love affair masterfully propels into a page-turning thriller. Raised in the theater world Kornfeld plays right into the theatrics finding herself center stage struggling to decipher fact from fiction. A hauntingly beautiful tale of love, loss, politics, and art that dares us all not to look away from our own disillusionment. Culminating with a crash and return that reveals while the world perhaps is not as grand as it once was, love even in death, may be the only truth that lives on.”
—Courtney B. Vance, Tony and Emmy Award-winning Actor and Producer
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“I was happily swept away by the passion, politics, pace, humor, heart, and finely tuned skills Kornfeld brings to The True, her astonishing new book.”
—Lynn Crawford, author of Shankus & Kitto : A Saga and Paula Regossy
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”The True is a gorgeously written twenty-first-century postmodern literary work convincing us that we only truly know where we are when on the wrong side of the looking glass. Passion, politics, lust, and theater drag us between the surreal and the real, on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a “now" age romance-political thriller.”
—September Williams, MD, Filmmaker, Author of the Chasing Mercury Toxic Trilogy
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“The True is a compelling, troubling, and painfully honest story about the world we live in now -- a world of fake news and alternative facts in which we believe what we want to believe and ignore or deny those nagging voices that tell us otherwise. It's also a story about theatre -- that most ancient art of dissembling; a world of artifice in which nothing is quite what it seems, but where deception is deployed in search of profound truths. And it is also a story about Romania, and about the twisted western view of that troubled eastern nation. Our narrator travels there in search of her undead lover, with Bucharest standing in for Transylvania, and bloodsuckers lurking at every turn. But in Kornfeld's deftly woven tale, there is sympathy even for the devil. The True lures the reader in with its dark poetry, and then refuses to let us go.”
— Stephen Scott-Bottoms, Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at University of Manchester and Author, “Playing Underground: A Critical History of 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement”
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“Intimate, funny, and page-turning, The True simultaneously expresses the ways in which we are haunted by memory and the ways we continue to con ourselves. What starts out as a love story that transcends time becomes a paean to the world of theater set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis and crumbling Romania. This book has everything: romance, Ceaușescu, Diana Ross. Interwoven throughout, the terror and pathos of being Jewish in Europe. The long tail of the Holocaust, the (c)overt antisemitism that still comprises common parlance. What does it mean to be a Jew searching for a Jew? What is Jewish identity? What is identity? Kornfeld's lucid prose cuts close to the heart and lends an immediacy to the whole crazy story as we watch everything unravel. The downward spiral has such a tentacular pull. I couldn't put the book down!”
—Emily Stone, Author of Did Jew Know?
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“Storytelling is a contract of trust between speaker and listener—the promise that the suspension of disbelief will be rewarded with deeper truths encoded in fiction. But "in this time of virtual lives," Kornfeld warns, such trust is easier to manipulate than ever, and the magic of theater degenerates into propaganda and psychosis. Against the backdrop of Trump's threat to American democracy, she goes on a fever-dream of a journey to understand the death and legacy of her former lover and mentor, Romanian theater director Alexandru Darie, who believed art was the only defense against the greed and delusion of Ceausescu's dictatorship. But when she's elaborately scammed by a young woman claiming to be Darie's girlfriend, Kornfeld is humbled to discover how anyone, regardless of political beliefs or intellectual sophistication, can cling to wishful thinking as a defense against personal and historical trauma. The True is a funny, tragic, essential cautionary tale for our post-truth era.”
—Jendi Reiter, author of An Incomplete List of My Wishes: Stories