From the author.
Self-publishing writers should not have a problem with self-reviewing their books. There is a risk, of course, that this may end up with "self-reading." But let me try, anyway.
This is a memoir of a former Soviet physicist of Jewish descent who came to the USA as a tourist and became a financial quant. It's mostly an émigré story. It has some sad pages about my relatives who fled from Nazi Germany and landed in Gulag. My descendants won't find their roots on Ancestry.com; I've written this piece for them, too. This book is also a tale of a man who wanted to be a scientist and became one. Finally, there is a gallery of my failed relationships with a hopefully happy ending (I keep fingers crossed).
"Papa, your life is your work and yet you write mostly about women," my daughter said. There is some truth in her words and I put them in the epigraph.
"You appear to have had an inherently interesting life," one independent publisher acknowledged. She rejected my book anyway.
"Biographies don't sell unless you're a celebrity," another publisher informed me. Maybe; I'm not in the marketing business (you already know that). I've written this book after I started having flashes of my memory that didn't go away. I put them onto paper but they are still with me.
Thanks for reading.
Alec Schmidt
Cedar Knolls NJ, October 2012.