(“I thought if I called myself Dykewomon,” she joked in an interview with J: The Jewish News of Northern California this year, “I’d never get a review in DailyExpertNews. That’s true.”
Her 1997 novel “Beyond the Pale,” about Russian Jewish lesbian immigrants who work in New York’s infamous Triangle shirt-waist factory and survive the deadly fire to become union members, won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. In 2009, she published ‘Risk’, a novel about a struggling middle-aged lesbian who gambles as an escape.
Elana Michelle Nachman was born in Manhattan on October 11, 1949, the eldest of three children to Harvey and Rachel (Weisberger) Nachman. Her father was a plaintiffs attorney who moved the family to Puerto Rico in 1958 to open a practice. Her mother was a researcher for Life magazine and later a librarian in Puerto Rico.
It was a fierce Zionist household. Her father, who had been a navigator in the United States Air Force in World War II, volunteered as a pilot in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, her brother, Mr. Nachman, said, and her mother helped smuggle weapons into Israel. .
Mrs. Dykewomon retained a strong sense of Jewish identity, even though she was not religious as an adult. She once said of her name change, “If I had to do it all over again, I might have chosen Dykestein or Dykeberg,” according to an obituary in The Times of Israel.
Even before she was a teenager, “Elana knew she was somehow ‘different,’ but was told by doctors that she couldn’t possibly be gay,” her brother said in an interview. Living in Puerto Rico from the age of eight, he added, she also felt “strongly alienated from Latin macho culture and the sexual role-playing by women and men there.”
