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The seventeen-year-old David was born in a Jewish family of Russian immigrants. He tries to live up to his family’s expectations by going to an orthodox school, dating with a beautiful blonde girl with a dowry, serving at prayer meetings in which his loved grandfather takes part. Gradually, however, he begins to question the rules governing the conservative community.

Eric Steele’s fiction debut is an equally insightful and reserved  portrait of a community of New York’s Jews in the eighties, in which the oldest generation nurtures the memory of the Holocaust and the youngest explores the world outside the Brighton Beach neighbourhood. The titular “minyan”, a quorum composed of ten older men, turns out unexpectedly to be the source of support for the character who discovers his homosexual orientation under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. A deliberate narrative with a tinge of reserved humour describes the double community of experiences in which the main character becomes involved – an intergenerational bond and solidarity of the socially excluded because of non-normative sexuality.

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