Joel Farber

Joel Farber is one of Sam's best friends.

He is the son of an accountant and is studying to be an accountant himself.

His family immigrated from Poland in the 1880s, and they are Jewish. They settled in Brooklyn.

A somewhat quiet and meek young man, Joel attends Columbia College. Joel is prone to being overly anxious and has a mother who is too concerned about him sometimes. After hearing of stories about young men who had died during WWI, she has been overly obsessed with sheltering Joel and preventing him from doing anything that can cost him his life or damage him severely.

As such, he lives at home while studying at Columbia College, and was not allowed to experience dorm life. Sam, similarly, lives at home and commutes to New York University. However, Sam was allowed to live at the dorms, but merely chose not to, because he couldn't really go without his creature comforts at home (and also he disliked most people living at the NYU dorms).

Joel has been friends with Sam since their early childhood and was part of Sam's graduating class from Abraham Lincoln High School. Joel is also good friends with Frankie, Sam's "third-best friend," who laughs at Joel's overly anxious mother and his shelteredness.

Joel is generally a bookworm with a penchant for fiction stories when he's not doing his work related to accounting. He doesn't have as much chutzpah (shameless audacity in Yiddish) as Sam, and sometimes wishes he had enough chutzpah to go against his domineering mother.

His biggest flaw is probably his tendency to be rather self-absorbed, though it's a different form of self-absorption than Sam's. He tends to talk too much about his relatively minor problems and focuses more on his issues than that of others when talking to them, in part due to his sheltered lifestyle.