There are more than 7 ‘billion’ people on earth—more than 7 billion centers of their own universe, more than 7 billion stories of human courage, cowardice, good, evil, and everything in between.Consider: What does a gopher think about when he’s burrowing through a tunnel? Or a fawn when his mother, shot by a hunter or caught by a predator, suddenly collapses in front of him? Or consider something much closer to home: You’re a 14-year-old girl, in the first blush of youthful beauty, who’s gone out in public for the first time in a scantily revealing outfit. The eyes of men and women, young and old, are on you—envious, lustful, appreciative, condemning, wishing … and their thoughts are not entirely honorable. What do ‘you’ feel, thinking about what’s going on in their minds? Fear, shame, excitement, pride, anticipation? Or you’re a 91-year-old man, wracked with pain and disease, knowing your moments on earth are numbered. What are ’you’ thinking?Each of us ‘lives’ her or his own story. Some, like me, ‘write’ about it. That’s why, to me, ‘every’ story ‘matters’, no matter how large or small, “important” or mundane. In this way I can reflect on the words of the ancient playwright Terence (c. 195 – 159 B.C.) who wrote, “Humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“Nothing human is alien to me.”I have often been asked, “Why do you write?” My response is, ‘I write because I breathe’. And I have learned that to be a writer requires work, sometimes sacrifice, and the determination to follow a certain road, wherever that road may lead. And because life is ‘always’ dynamic, ‘always changing, a new challenge around the next corner’, whenever anyone asks me, “What is your favorite of all the books you have written?” I can truthfully answer: ‘The next one’.As I think back, I have found that life is a combination of predestination and acts of the will. But for the fact that a certain zygote was formed at a certain time, in a certain place, in a certain way, I could well have been that gopher or that fawn I spoke about. Had I been conceived by my parents a short time before I was, I might have perished in the Holocaust. Each person on earth ‘could have’ been born a different species, in a different culture, with different opportunities or challenges, or maybe not at all. Think about what would have happened had the sperm that won the race to make me been ‘second’. Those are scary thoughts, but then again I have always thought that the meaning of life is ‘getting over fear —and that’s a challenge each of us face every day of our lives’. These are not things we consciously think of every day, but occasionally … maybe …Had my parents not been two of the very few that made it out of Vienna, ‘Germany’ (you read that right, it was ‘after’ the ‘Anschluss’), there would have been no me. Had they not made it to America—to Baltimore, Maryland, someone else might have been born in my place. Had they not failed in business and elected to move all the way across the country to Los Angeles, California when I was six years old—so poor we could hardly pay ‘attention’—our family might not have turned out as close-knit as it did. I would not have taken up piano, which led to me forming a pretty awful band, the Swing Tones, when I was twelve years old, which, in turn, led to a better band a few years later on, seventy commercially-released recordings, and three genuine “hit” records.When I was twelve, I thought for the first time about what I wanted to be when I grew up. It came down to three choices: a foreign correspondent, a Rabbi, or a lawyer. While the latter two professions weren’t “real” at 12, I could —and did, start ‘The Neighborhood News’, which I typed in quintuplicate, using carbon paper, on an old Royal “portable” typewriter, which was so out of sync that the “e” and the “s” kept jumping every time I hit the keyboard. In time, I started writing my first series of short stories when I was a junior in high school.I remember one of the first “choices” I made. We lived in the middle of a triangle between University High School, Venice High School, and Hamilton High School, which served three completely different racial, cultural, and religious populations. I could select any of the three schools. My first choice was University because a lot of my friends from elementary and junior high school went there. But at the last possible moment, I switched my choice to Hamilton because it was heavily Jewish, because it had a football team so bad that even I could try out for the team (and make it to third string), because it stressed intellectual prowess and entertainment ability over athletic skill, and because it had an “attitude” of “when it comes to a challenge, there’s no such thing as ‘can’t.’” Not only did Hami profoundly influence my life, including lifelong friendships, but it has played a role in my writing (‘Arcade’; ‘Whatever Happened to the Heiwans?’).Hamilton also influenced my life in more subtle, but ultimately more meaningful ways. Socially, although I never lacked for friends, I was never in the top tier of high school society and I invariably came in ‘second’ in school elections. While I scored very high in the equivalent of the SAT’s, it wasn’t high ‘enough’ to merit a scholarship, and since money was a very scarce commodity in our family, that meant U.C.L.A. at $68 a semester instead of an Ivy League school or even Stanford. That impact on my writing has been more profound than I ever could have imagined. Just about all of my historical novels deal with people like me—“second string” characters who never ‘quite’ made it to the top rung of fame or fortune, but without whom history might have been less meaningful and certainly less interesting. ‘Billy Jenkins’, for example; or those three “little” men, Al Schwimmer, Charlie Winters, and Hank Greenspun, who played relatively small but monumental roles in ‘Against All Odds’; ‘Otto Skorzeny’, whose fifteen minutes of fame did not propel him to immortality; or ‘Amazing Grace O’Malley’, the Irish woman pirate-patriot, who is largely relegated to an historical asterisk today. Ordinary people, whose extraordinary lives made a difference.More choices and more consequences. When I was going to law school, I actually worked ¾ time in a small law firm—one or two lawyers. The independence I found there made me realize I simply did not want to work in a large firm, make a fortune, and accomplish nothing much in the way of helping ‘human beings with human problems’. Ultimately, while my ‘small’ law firm successfully survived the “feast or famine” endemic to such a venture, my experience also led to characters in my novels who refused to succumb to or be beaten down by far more powerful interests: Turhan Türkoğlu and Halide Orhan, perhaps my greatest protagonists (‘The Motherland Saga’: ‘Legacy’, ‘Emergence’, and ‘Coming of Age’); ‘Scribe’s’ Pope Joan; Grace O’Malley; Schwimmer, Winters, and Greenspun; Billy Jenkins, Lev Arkady, Penny Fullerton (‘Arcade’), and Ezra Caen (‘Assassin’, ‘The Wrecking Crew’, ‘ChildFinders’), and Mordechai ben Zvi (‘Stalemate’). Once again, ordinary people, whose extraordinary lives made a difference.Unquestionably, the two greatest choices in my life came fifteen years apart. When I graduated from law school, I owed my country four years as a legal officer in the Air Force as a legal officer. I was given a choice of three assignments: one in South Carolina, one in Florida, and one in Phoenix, Arizona, only a five-hour drive from Los Angeles, where I’d grown up. Eager for adventure in a faraway place, I opted for Florida. But 48 hours before I was set to depart for my assignment, I called Washington, D.C. and asked if Luke Air Force Base, Arizona was still available. That choice was one that totally changed my life. For one thing, I met my closest friends of many, many years: we both shared the same city in our next assignment, after two years in Arizona; and we both ultimately moved to Monterey, California where we became law partners. Of equal importance and amazement, my next assignment after Luke was to Ankara, Turkey, a place which, in my opinion, wasn’t even a major player on the world stage. How wrong I was! My first book, like my first child, was conceived in Turkey, even though I never completed that book until many years later. That magnificent, tortured land consumed—and still consumes—me. And what an immensely richer person I’ve become because of my years there!The second choice, and the most meaningful in my entire life, was finding, falling in love with, and ultimately marrying Lorraine, who encouraged me to follow my dream and write, who supported my decision every step of the way, and who recently published her own first book. Who could have predicted that a woman of Lithuanian descent, who lived the first 31 years of her life in Johannesburg, South Africa, would migrate to Monterey, California, where she would meet a man who’d grown up in Los Angeles, California, and who ended up in Monterey as a result of a choice to be stationed in nearby Arizona instead of faraway Florida?Like every one of the 7 billion human beings on earth, I’ve had my share of good times and bad, sickness and health, sorrow and sublime happiness. My “victory” has ultimately come by getting over fear, and, in the words of the late Rabbi Alvin Fine, “by going from defeat to defeat to defeat, until I’ve realized that the ultimate victory does not come at some high place in the road, but in having made the journey we all make, a sacred pilgrimage to life everlasting.”My blessings to you all.HugoRead more about this authorRead less about this author