The Federation is pleased to announce that the 2025 Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Prize will be awarded to B. V. Glants for his debut novel Half Notes from Berlin.

Set in Germany in 1933, Half Notes from Berlin follows fifteen-year-old student Hans Meyer as Nazi ideology assumes a grip on his world. In particular, one of his teachers is a fervent believer who dresses in Nazi attire and seeks to indoctrinate his students and isolate those who do not conform. Meanwhile, Hans learns a secret his family has kept from him: his maternal grandparents are Jews who converted to Christianity many years ago. As most of his friends join the Hitler Youth and espouse Nazism, Hans finds himself becoming drawn to Rebecca, the sole Jewish girl in his class. As his family secret weighs on him, and as his concern for the safety of his friend and his family increases, he faces choices that carry great consequences.

B.V. Glants was born in Donetsk, Ukraine (at the time part of the Soviet Union), and moved to the United States with his family at the age of 10. His family had strong literary proclivities — they brought a library of a thousand books with them to their new country — and his father was a published poet. After they settled in Fair Lawn, New Jersey (which had become home to many émigrés from the former Soviet Union), Glants recalls his father taking him to yard sales in search of used books and showing him which American authors were the ones to read.

Glants attended Brandeis University, where, knowing that writing was unlikely to be a dependable source of income, he majored in computer science. After moving to California so that his wife could attend graduate school at UC Santa Cruz, and ultimately become a professor at Stanford, Glants became a serial entrepreneur, founding four companies in the technology sector.

However, his love of writing did not wane. He received an MFA in writing from the California College of the Arts, and has continued to maintain a dedicated writing practice alongside his day job. He notes, “I think I’m just happier when I write. And if I go for three weeks without writing, I get noticeably crankier.”

He also appreciates the craft of writing as a complement to his professional life and its rhythms. He observes, “Because the milestones that you’ve set for your companies may be three or five years out, it’s harder to experience daily fulfillment from doing something tangible on a regular basis. But writing is a very grounding thing. If I wrote 500 words today, I feel as if I accomplished something, versus ‘I had a meeting, and it may help me reach my goal in five years.’”

Glants is also very active in the Jewish community as a lay leader, and began by volunteering at Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto. He is now set to be the school’s incoming president. His involvement at Hausner also led to participation in the Wexner Heritage Program.

Asked about setting a book in Germany during the 1930s, Glants recalls that the book’s origins date to when, as a college student he came across a historical book entitled Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, which detailed the complicated experience of mischlinge – Germans who had both Aryan and Jewish genetic backgrounds. He says, “And I think this sort of identity, of a person who isn’t firmly in one spot or the other, which also reminded me of my own immigrant experience, really drew me. And I started reading a lot of memoirs and books about mischlinge before I really decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to go and write this.’”