My inspiration for this novel is work I did several years ago helping my friends Sarah Ogilvie and Scott Miller (both of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) research and edit their exceptional book Refuge Denied: The St. Louis Passengers and the Holocaust (University of Wisconsin Press). During that project, I had the honor of meeting and interviewing a number of Holocaust survivors (and veterans of the St. Louis voyage) living within the large German-Jewish community of Manhattan’s Washington Heights - so-called Frankfurt on the Hudson. This novel is dedicated to the memory of one of them, Ilse Marcus, born 1914 in Breslau, Germany, who lost her entire family. Ilse herself barely survived Auschwitz. She weighed only 70 pounds on the day of her liberation by Soviet troops - January 27th, 1945. And so, yes, this book is dedicated to Ilse, - the warm, gentle lady who fed me cookies and tea in her small apartment one grey day of 1999, and told me her story.

I am the author of numerous non-fiction works (histories and biographies) published by such houses as Doubleday, Crown, Basic Books, and Oxford University Press. My books include The Kennedys at War, The Lion’s Pride, The Secret Six, and Dark Genius of Wall Street.

My essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, and Hearst’s Veranda.

I am also a 35 year vet from the publisher side of the business, having done stints at St. Martin’s Press and other houses, including seven years as Director of Computer Publishing Programs at Macmillan/MBCI (later called Newbridge and today part of the Bookspan/Book of the Month Club group of companies). I’m currently the proprietor of my own small press, New Street Communications, doing digital, paper, and audio editions out of offices on the southern Rhode Island coast. Although I’ve of late published a small bit of my own non-fiction via New Street, I am somewhat loath to publish my fiction via my own platform. (It feels too ego-maniacal.) I like the idea of Inkshares and have thus decided to give it a try.