Look and Listen

Biography

Before I came to live in the U.S. I had already lived in 5 countries: Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany.I received my B.A.in English from Cal State L.A., decided teaching wasn't for me and worked for Hollywood PR agencies, got burned out and dropped out to follow my dream of writing and traveling, which eventually brought me to Seattle. Along the way there were plenty of day jobs, all fodder for the creative mind. I've been a press agent in Hollywood, a waitress, a shop owner, a typist, worked for a florist, was a sales manager, worked in banking, became a human resources officer, and many more jobs, all fodder for the creative mind. But "Irretrievably Broken" was ultimately inspired by a newspaper clipping from my hometown in Germany. Read more about this in Inspiration.

Inspiration

"Irretrievably Broken" was inspired by a newspaper clipping from my hometown in Germany. A neighboring property had been torn down and a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, was unearthed. Experts speculated that a synogogue was most likely situated beneath the foundations of the house I lived in as a child. I read the clipping and promptly forgot about it. Or so I thought! But this discovery must have been burned into my subconscious. After I finished the novel I rediscovered the clipping and realized how these facts had informed my writing. There, at the heart of a story of adventure and travel, of love and loss, guilt and forgiveness was a Holocaust story, come to light after years of concealment, very much like the mikvah that had been unearthed so many years later under our former neighbor's house in a small German town where no one in post-WW2 Germany ever spoke about such things.