A Sometimes Strange Story

A wise scholar once said, “There is a plan for each one of us outside of our control. From the moment we are born, we are set on our own predetermined road. Anything we would do could help or interfere. It may delay the passage, but we would never stray off its course. We would always come back and move along again.”
If a novel could be at the same time a prequel and a sequel to a once-told story, this book would be it. If a nineteen-year-old man listened to his instincts and took a different turn in Vienna, his entire life would have changed…

He finds himself in the foreign country on the other side of the globe. He doesn’t know anything about his adoptive land, he is all alone in the entire universe. A sequence of random encounters leads to unexpected events in his life. Within a few short weeks, the man finds a job, a new home, a university to go to, and even a girl. All — without speaking the language. “If I told my college buddies back in Russia that I slept with an American girl, they would’ve thought I was out of my mind,” were his thoughts, studying his naked friend peacefully sprawled on the bed next to him.

The pace of his life intensifies with every new encounter, until one day, the young man finds himself in Italy. He must adapt to yet another country. He is thrown in the midst of other people’s lives, and becoming a part of it.

And yet, he was returned to the path his “other self” had followed already in the book “Russian Jews Don’t Cry,” written by the author. The novels have no connection to each other and stand as independent stories.