Hello,
thank you for agreeing to this interview. Could you tell us a little
about yourself as well as Birth
of An Assassin?
What
made you write about the Soviet, Post-War time period?
Relatives
told me of their parents living in ‘The Pale’ (a barren strip of
land where the Jewish population was forced to live – the reality
of Fiddler on the Roof). They escaped the czarist pogroms of the late
19th
century. Some came to England, others to the US and Canada.
I
looked into Jewish history in Russia and came up with an idea for a
story, but it didn’t fit the time of the White Russians, so I
trawled through the country's history until coming to the post-war
period. Without getting too philosophical here, Jez (the hero)
represents the whole of the Jewish population while Otto (the
villain) is those people whose prejudice is all-consuming. Apart from
it making a fit, I also took away the protagonists religion to
demonstrate that it isn’t only about beliefs.
