Alan Fleishman Reviews

Today my wife Ann and I live with our Siberian kitty, Pasha, high on a mountain overlooking San Francisco Bay. Before starting my writing career, I had been an advertising consultant, senior corporate executive, university adjunct college, corporate board member, community volunteer, and an officer at the U.S. Army. Then at a time when most people are progressing, I started this new vocation as a novelist. Here's how it occurred.

My dad Ben was born in the Ukraine atop the worst of the Russian Tsar's bloody 1905 anti-Jewish riots - pogroms. Shortly after, my grandfather Max escaped with his family to America. A hundred decades later, I returned to the Ukraine. I paid my respects at a tombstone honoring the victims of this 1905 pogroms and stood in the square in which the Nazis in 1941 rounded up tens of thousands of Jews and marched them off to be executed. Had my grandparents never left Russia when they did, I could have perished in a square like this one.

My yearning to associate with those grandparents I never understood arose in these moments. Writing novels seemed to be the sole means for me to satisfy that fire. This Resulted in my first book, Goliath's Head, then to A Fine September Morning, and finally to Lara's Shadow. I had been more than a bit surprised by the superb reception to every one of my novels. The wide audience of subscribers were a combination of the two Jews and also non-Jews keenly interested in the chronicles of Twentieth Century Jews, from persecution into tragedy into triumph. Most were from the United States, but a substantial number came from a number of other parts of the world too.

With the exact same passion born of appreciation, my latest novel, Odyssey of Chaos, turns focus on my grandparents. They came to America from Greece from the early Twentieth Century. However, nearly all of my grandmother's family remained behind, finally settling at Athens. That is where they had been when the Germans invaded Greece in 1941 and occup

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