About
I wrote a two-act play, a book for a musical, and a novel before finishing high school. They are memories now; thankfully, none of their pages exist. Journalism was my plan when I started college, but for a number of reasons, some noble, some practical, and some a little cowardly, I changed directions. I am proud of my forty years in medicine. The only things better have been being a father and a husband.
A dozen years ago, I started writing again. A couple of short essays made it into the New York Times and several short stories were published in online journals. In 2015 I started a novel. I blame that on Mr. Slater, my 11th grade English teacher at Newton South High School, and on Robert Penn Warren. When he assigned All the King's Men to the class, I told Mr. Slater I had recently read it and saw no need to do it again. He told me to be quiet and pay attention and proceeded to open my eyes to what a novel can do - symbolism, foreshadowing, character arc, tragedy, the sweep of history, the individual moments that mark a turn in life. I have been hooked as a reader ever since.
My first novel is finished. I am into the second and thinking about the third. I need to work a little faster, though. If I take the same time with numbers two and three, I will be in my mid eighties before that last one is published.
Featured Work
Walk the Earth as Brothers - A Novel
Two Jewish brothers plan futures full of achievement and maybe fame. Daniel wants to become the next Le Corbusier, Ian the next Gustave Eiffel. But Warsaw in the summer of 1939 is no place for dreamers.
As war erupts, Ian is thrown west to Paris. There, he unexpectedly falls in love with a mysterious Frenchwoman named Alicia, With the city about to fall to the Nazis, he must leave her and masquerading as a French soldier, race across France to reach safety in Casablanca. The passage on to Britain, though, may be the most dangerous part of his journey.
Daniel is captured by the Soviet army. Instead of a firing squad, he is consigned to the Siberian Gulag, where he faces endless blizzards, starvation, and the often-lethal cruelties of guards and fellow prisoners. Yet he too finds someone, an exiled poet named Nadhya, until he must choose: stay with her or cross all of Russia and return to family and the future he’d envisioned.
Walk the Earth as Brothers is the story of two pawns in a titanic world war. A story of bravery, random chance, kindness, betrayal, and love. A story of what happens to Daniel and Ian’s hopes and dreams, and how their fight for survival changes who they become
