I was an urban professional before struggling with depression and homelessness. I lived on desert streets for years and had stints in psychiatric wards, a homeless shelter, and a fundamentalist mission in the San Bernardino National Forest.
With no chance of escaping myself, I needed hope. The hope that would come from these books. They guided me above the bottom that I had fallen through. They inspired me forward.
I hope you find them as inspiring.
| All the Beautiful Words | Last Jew in Prague | The Chanukah Gift |
A homeless man’s altercation on a desert bus reveals an obscure book of Czech poetry. Along with a mystery relating to it and his grandfather from eighty years earlier in Nazi-occupied Prague.
Hermann Weiss is a former police detective waiting for his inevitable deportation to a concentration camp when he stumbles upon a suicide that may not be a suicide. Can he find the motivation to solve this one last case?
“All the Beautiful Words” is a short story about desperation and aspiration and how the two can entwine.
A homeless man struggling to survive a freezing, rainy night in the desert recalls what his grandfather struggled to survive during World War II and how his connection to this upended his own life.
Hermann Weiss had been the best police detective in Prague’s Jewish district of Josefov. Until the Nazis occupy the city and deport its Jews. He finds himself in Theresienstadt concentration camp, waiting his turn to die.
One night, he receives a visit from an SS captain named Klaus Stamm, who’d been his friend in college before their falling out over Hermann’s future wife Ana. Klaus offers Hermann his freedom if he can discover who murdered three SS officers found near synagogues in Josefov. He threatens to shoot him if he refuses.
Hermann wants to refuse the offer. Still reeling from the recent loss of Ana, he yearns for death. He only agrees to help because of a promise that he’d made to Ana. But as he delves into the case, he senses that it’s leading him somewhere. He becomes driven to solve it. The two men, in spite of tensions threatening to boil over, uncover the pursuit of an object hidden beneath the ancient synagogues. Which hurls them toward both the killer and Hermann’s fate.
Last Jew in Prague is a historical mystery thriller that's about lifting yourself up when all you want to do is keep falling.
On a Chanukah in a windswept desert, a homeless man receives a series of letters postmarked thirty-five years earlier. Inside them are journal entries that he reads over the phone to his estranged twin sister Rudi. They come from a dying eighteen year old named Yon, who changed both their lives in the early 1980s and will do so a second time.
The journal tells of a secret Chanukah gift Yon got. One that returns him to a year earlier. To before he met Rudi. He learns that he can avoid the event that will trigger his death by not falling in love with her.
This should be easy. Yon can’t recall Rudi beyond a few fleeting minutes with her. Moreover, he has looks, wealth, and a bright future while she’s a troubled punk with no future at all.
But he can’t prevent how this one-woman rollercoaster capsizes him and makes him feel alive. Nor can he shy away from an ages-old hate that threatens to destroy her and could do the same to him. Choosing between saving her and himself won’t be easy at all.
The Chanukah Gift is a big, emotional, and uplifting love story. A tearjerker and proud of it.