Saturday, May 19, 2012

Despite having lived for nearly a century, I feel like a first grader in my new world of wireless browsing.
I'm stumbling to find the right button to push, the tiny square that will connect me
with the new billion-hit game -- a game that will bring me readers for my books.
It's the smart young browsers  I'm looking for,
the ones who need to  learn about the long-gone events which made the world they live in
and want to conquer,
Once they would have heard these stories from grandparents living next door.
But now most of those are living down in Florida or maybe even Tahiti . . .
It's just we few  -- we lucky few -- who are still around to tell what it was like when the Great Depression battered our teen years . . . when WW II played havoc with the hopes and dreams of our twenties . . .
Those times are what changed the world into the dangerous age we're now living through.
My own life was turned upside down much earlier still by the Russian Revolution, which broke up my family in my childhood, and made us move halfway around the world.
That was the first story I knew I had to tell, though I was in my '80s when I finally got to publish it.
Since then many many readers have thanked me:
"My grandmother would never talk about her life in Poland," or "I've always wanted to know how my grandfather lived before he came to America."
Maybe it's this need to tell my stories that's the reason I'm still around, getting near my 98th birthday this fall.

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