Eliezer’s latest book, The Silver Lining of Alzheimer’s: One Son’s Journey Into the Unknown,tells the poignant tale of he and his wife Shari managing the final six years of at-home care in his mother’s 20-year journey, until she passed at 95.

His father took care of her until he fell backward down the steps at 90, and suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury.  Instantly there were two dementia patients at home, and Eliezer & Shari moved in with them that very night and lived there for 10 months to essentially set up a fully-staffed, working nursing home for two.

During that adventure, Sobel published two adult picture books for people with memory challenges. Both contain artful and realistic photographs of familiar images, along with short, easy-to-read captions in large print. No memory was required to turn the pages! The first one, Blue Sky, White Clouds, was designed for the general dementia population, while the second one, L’Chaim! Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life, was obviously geared specifically toward Jewish people.

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While serving in his capacity as an amateur human being over his 72 years, Eliezer divided his time between the creative life — writing, painting, playing music, performing, teaching — and the life of the spiritual aspirant — suffering, seeking, striving, sitting and silence. The sordid details of that journey are chronicled in his book, The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments.

Eliezer’s two paths merged at one point in the form of the Wild Heart Journal: “Art, Creativity & Spiritual Life,” for which he served as publisher and editor for five years. The magazine developed from his book, Wild Heart Dancing: A Personal One-Day Quest to Liberate the Artist and Lover Within, which in turn grew out of intensive creativity workshops he led for many years at Esalen Institute and around the United States.

Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in A World That is Heartbroken, Sobel’s award-winning first novel, was shuffled between multiple agents and accumulated rejection slips for nearly 15 years. (See First Novel Blues.) Then, in a coincidental and staggering wave of encouragement from the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, of all places, the Knoxville Writer’s Guild gave Minyan the 2003 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and only weeks later Knoxville’s New Millennium Writings awarded Mordecai’s Book loosely excerpted from Minyan, its 2003 First Prize for short fiction.

Eliezer also blogs for PsychologyToday.com and has published Articles, Short Stories and poetry in Tikkun, Yoga Journal, Quest Magazine, Inner Directions, Magical Blend, New Age Journal, Mudfish, the Village Voice, Epoch, Zeek, The Hook, The Journal of Pastoral Care, The Minetta Review, the Widow, and others. He also served as the Associate Publisher and Editor of The New Sun magazine in the late 70s.

Eliezer Sobel lives in Red Bank, New Jersey with his wife, Shari Cordon. Their cats, the late Peanut, Plum, and Squarcialupi passed on to their next cat-lives several years ago; their present cats, Reb Shlomo-Bob Schneerson and Nudnick, have asked that their privacy be respected on these pages.