I was born one dark gray morn for reasons both unknown and hard to discern.
The city of my birth was called Kharkov, nowadays known as Kharkiv. The house I was born in was razed in ‘80s, no great loss, though no place left for a plaque, alas.
My father was in the military, my mother was in the medical. Nuff said.
I grew up on the banks of the Volga where we moved from one Air Force base to another till we settled in the dour town of Syzran, the realm of dust and mud and subzero temperatures on any scale. These gory details and more can be found in a book called From Lenin to Lennon.
After I graduated from high school, it took me exactly 24 hours to get on the train and leave. Moscow was an improvement, but only temporarily. Soon after I graduated from Foreign Language School, I departed for the West, which took a little longer and was a little more dramatic (keywords: Jews, Israel, KGB).
In the West, I kept moving from St. Louis to NYC to LA to San Antonio to NYC to Israel to Seattle, with other exciting places in between, though none so exciting as to claim me for long. Eventually, NYC won, by default, and I ended up spending the last 30 years here, on Manhattan’s West Side.
I made a living by a) translating books and fools, cabbages and kings; b) teaching – Russian in LA, English (ESL) in NYC, Writing in DC, Driving in Texas; and 3) writing
Writing is something I find easier to do than to talk about, so let the content on this site tell you the story.
more biographic stuff is in HIGHLIGHT MEMORIES:
IL CARCERE, or MY ROMAN HOLIDAY