Come participate in the Cleveland Jewish Book Festival and see Peter Blauner, author of Picture in the Sand!

Picture in the Sand is a historical suspense novel about faith, hope, terror, and the movies. In 1954, a young movie fan named Ali Hassan gets a dream job working for Cecil B. DeMille on a film about the greatest of Jewish liberation stories, The Ten Commandments, in Egypt. But that dream turns into a nightmare when Ali gets caught up in real-life events of the day, including the aftermath of the war with Israel and his country’s struggles with violent religious fanatics. He ends up in prison, but he finds salvation there in an unlikely life-saving friendship with a Jewish filmmaker. It’s a story Ali has kept secret for decades. But now, as an older successful businessman living in America, he’s forced to share it with a beloved grandson who’s about to make the same mistakes by going off to fight in a holy war.

This project is part of the Cleveland Jewish Book Festival and was funded in part by an Ohio Humanities Ignite Grant.

Curious about other grants? Visit our calendar or browse our list of grantees!