Each morning, whether I’m in Manhattan or at my house in Long Island, I read obituaries looking for names of my contemporaries much as 60 years ago, sitting on the terrace of a Paris café, I scanned the Herald Tribune’s shipping news to see whether acquaintances had landed in Cherbourg or Le Havre. A normal enough occupation for an 82-year-old nearing the end of his life. And I take stock of my literary production. I have published 12 novels, two books of nonfiction, a number of short stories, and many articles and book reviews. I am working—desultorily—on a new novel or perhaps two novels. For the last nine months I have been the happy owner of a French bulldog named Grisha. Training him and taking him for walks accounts for a great deal of time that might otherwise be devoted to writing.



This may look like a lean harvest for someone my age. But as I’ve been often told, I am a late starter. I wrote my first novel, Wartime Lies, in 1989, when I was 56. It was published in early 1991 when I was 57. It follows that I’ve been a professional writer for only 25 years, rather than 50 or more, as would be typical for my early blooming colleagues. Moreover, until 2004, I was a full-time practicing lawyer, and I wrote my own stuff only on weekends and vacations.

Why didn’t I become a professional writer sooner, like for instance my college classmate John Updike?

My late start has led readers and journalists to ask why I didn’t become a professional writer sooner, right after college, like for instance my college classmate John Updike. If we disregard for a moment the elephant in the room, which is John’s tremendous talent and fluency, he had an essential advantage. From the beginning he had a beloved subject: Shillington, where he had lived as a boy, transformed into mythical Olinger.

I had no Olinger. I was born in Poland in 1933, lived there through World War II, and came to the United Sates only in March 1947. When I composed my first short stories as a senior in high school and as a college freshman and sophomore, I believed I was only qualified to write about Poland during World War II. I didn’t understand my new surroundings—Brooklyn where my parents and I had settled and their friends who were mostly other refugees from Poland—in a way that made them useful as a writer’s material. So I kept on making up those little wartime stories until, during my junior year at college, I dropped the creative writing course I was taking. The instructor liked my work and encouraged me. The problem was that I didn’t. I told him that since I had no other material I had better shut up.

And afterward? I plunged into grownup life. I was drafted and served in the army; I married; I went to law school; I had three children; I went to work for a very good law firm; I found I loved practicing law; 42 years ago I remarried and have lived happily ever since. And why did I break my silence and write Wartime Lies in 1989? The explanation is prosaic: I was on a sabbatical from my law firm from August through November 1989, my children were grown, there were no claims on my time that took priority. On August 1, I sat down at my desk, opened my brand new Toshiba laptop, and began to write. I wrote every day with what seems to me in retrospect great steadiness. In August I wrote at our summer place in Eastern Long Island, and I continued during our sojourns in Venice, Seville, and finally Paris, where I finished the book and revised it.