Madam Chairman

About the Book

Bring together a powerful woman politician, an unscrupulous opposition, and neo-Nazis led by a madman and you have a new genre, the political suspense thriller. In Madam Chairman, author Len Cohen evokes the gaudy flavor of local political campaigns, the shifting alliances, and the crosscurrents of power, ambition and deception.

Marlene “Mickey” Feldsher is the Chairman of the Democratic Town Committee of Liberty Township in Arolla County. Her husband, Ben, is a successful inventor and entrepreneur. The Feldshers have one child, Hildy, a student at Georgetown Law School. The affluence of this observant Jewish family allows Mickey to avidly pursue her political career, and to fulfill her (self-imposed) obligation to contribute large amounts of money to her Party and to political campaigns. Her reputation as a winner and her generosity have transformed her into one of the most powerful politicians in her State, with many important and wealthy friends, and essentially unlimited access to elected officials at all levels of government.

During her six years as Liberty Town Chairman, Mickey has come to realize that local politics is a war fought on many fronts. Naturally, the political Parties battle each other. But also within each Party, the white male establishment fights to remain exclusive in order to keep control over Party affairs. Mickey wants her Party’s leadership to change, to become more diverse, certainly to move toward gender equality. She believes that equal opportunity and fairness for women in the United States will come about as a by-product of the (inevitable) success of women in local politics, at the time women become equal partners with men in the making of policy and laws.

The book begins with Mickey rallying support to oust the corrupt County Political Director, Osgood Pike, who is a misogynist and a racist. On the counterattack, Pike enlists the help of his allies, Levi Night and Delano Fingers, promising to actively support their efforts to take over Liberty’s Democratic Town Committee and to broaden their influence in the Town’s government.

Ben, the major point-of-view (POV) character, is in the ideal position to follow Mickey’s political victories and defeats, her interactions with her supporters, detractors and opponents, and to chronicle the upheavals in the Feldsher family during the approximately one year duration of the story (May 1991-June 1992).

Mickey is an extremely competent, intuitively gifted politician. She is also quite beautiful and stylish. But, operating in a gritty world dominated by men often brings out the worst in Mickey, both in her career and in her marriage. She can be and often is opinionated, stubborn and arrogant.

Ben had a brief, much regretted affair ten years before our story begins. Although never admitting his infidelity, he suspects that Mickey knows, and that she has finally found a way to punish him by allowing herself to be drawn into an affair with her political mentor and friend, Kyle Flynn. Guilt-ridden, Ben is convinced that Mickey will leave him if her political career falters.

Daughter Hildy and Mickey are in conflict. Mickey is overprotective toward her diabetic daughter, blaming herself for passing on the illness from her mother. Hildy is a smart, capable young woman, who is asserting her independence from her overbearing mother, in part by becoming engaged to a Gentile man.

The secondary POV is that of Levi Night. He is a party to the plans to ruin Mickey’s career and reputation, and an ally to Fingers in his determination to control the Liberty Town Committee. On the surface Night appears to be a dedicated family man, the head of the food services department at a local hospital, a good citizen and an aspiring local politician. But Night has a terrible secret: he is the leader (“The Superior”) of the Righteous Reich, a violent neo-Nazi gang. Spurred b

About the Author

Len Cohen {Ph.D. (U. of Illinois), BS (Tufts)} teaches memoir, is an Internet entrepreneur (e-memoir.com and iClasses.net) and a prolific writer of articles and technical papers. Madam Chairman is his first novel. A sequel, Lady of the House, is in progress. Len and Marilyn recently celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary.