Neal Rechtman was born and raised in rural Pickens County, Alabama. He studied fiction writing with Alan Lelchuk and J. R. Humphreys, and published his first short story while a senior at Brandeis University in 1975. After a thirty year pause to marry and raise two sons, he resumed his literary efforts with his first novel,The 28th Amendment (Bascom Hill, 2008).
In 2004 he began a “deep dive” into the history and writing of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, and has remained submerged ever since. Most recently Rechtman has focused on Brandeis’s involvement in the early years of the Zionist movement, and argues that the modern State of Israel would not exist today if Brandeis had not assumed his unique leadership role in world Zionist affairs. His second novel, The Ashwander Rules (2019), includes three Brandeis-inspired legal concepts embedded in the narrative, one of which has become the subject of extended research by Dr. Adam Feldman, author of the blog Empirical SCOTUS.
Rechtman tries his hand at non-fiction in Fear of Dying (2018), documenting his wife Jane’s relatively stress-free acceptance of a terminal diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer. Using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous treatise On Death and Dying as a framework, he narrates Jane’s calm navigation of the ”five stages of grief” and details for the reader the reasoning she used to maintain her fearless perspective.
Neal Rechtman lives and works in Christ Church, Barbados. In addition to his writing, he is a lifelong devotee of bridge (the card game) and plays for the Barbados national bridge team. He is also active in the tiny Barbados Jewish Community. He is the proud father of two sons and two daughters-in-law, and an even prouder Saba (grandfather) to two granddaughters and one grandson.