As far back as I can remember, I had a book in my lap. I read in bed and at the kitchen table, on the bus and in the hospital waiting room, on the park bench and during boring university lectures. I read everything and anything: Homer and Shakespeare, Isaac Asimov and Mark Twain, Alexandre Dumas and Cervantes, pulp fiction, Agatha Christie, comic strips, and literary and science magazines.
Books transported me from my dreary childhood apartment in the heart of the Soviet Union into a vast prairie, outer space, or the depth of an ocean. Not being able to physically leave my restrictive homeland, I could chase an elusive whale, engage in a chivalrous duel, traverse Middle-Earth, survive the frozen Alaska wasteland, or battle alongside the pirates. All these adventures were courtesy of my uncle, a reclusive former teacher, who introduced me to the written word and with it an amazing realm of literary creativity when I was four years old.
My uncle passed when I was a teenager, and from friends attending his memorial I learned his life story, an incredible journey of a world-wanderer and three-time-refugee, making me realize, for the first time in my life that reality could be as amusing and terrifying as imagination. I learned how my uncle returned to the Soviet Union from Shanghai after World War II to search for his father, who had been tossed into a Stalin’s labor camp without so much as a court hearing. Through perseverance and sheer luck, he succeeded in his mission, only to discover that what seemed like the ultimate end turned out to be just another rung on the long-drawn-out ladder of life contests.
For a long while, I nourished an idea to compose his adventures as a novel, simultaneously honoring the man I knew, and countless other women and men who made this world a little kinder by introducing the treasure of reading to the next generation. Initially, I thought that the narrative, I spent years perfecting, was nothing more than a personal bagatelle interesting only to a few family members and friends. However, the recent war in Ukraine and especially the persona of the leader of that heroic nation, an unassuming Ukrainian Jew, who just like my uncle refused to give up in the face of the overwhelming odds, forced me to reconsider and seek a publisher for my novel.
