The Jewish Daily Forward profiled "the oracle of literary Brooklyn community," Ezra Goldstein, co-owner of Community Bookstore in the Park Slope section as well as Terrace Books in nearby Windsor Terrace, which he and co-owner Stephanie Valdez bought earlier this year.
A native of Zanesville, Ohio, Goldstein faced a choice between staying in Zanesville and helping run the family electrical shop or "chase the dream of being a writer." He wrote the play Swimming with Sturgeon, a YA novel about a Holocaust survivor, two ghost-written memoirs for Holocaust survivors and many newspaper and magazine articles.
Then in 2011, he and Valdez bought Community Bookstore. The Forward noted, "He's wistful about his former writing life--he has hardly written a word since buying the store--but he's invigorated by an 'all-consuming' job that's changed his life '180 degrees.' … he's become an oracle for readers and most of all a magnet for the hundreds of writers who live within a stickball swing of the Seventh Avenue store."