The Ahasfer Game
The first novel in the Michael Fridman trilogy
by
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London is a place where destinies and fortunes are made. I arrived there in the dry June of 1989, having spent three years in Israel after a painful emigration from the Soviet Union. My very first encounter on British soil was with a passport control officer, and he made me think hard about the purpose and meaning of my existence; not quite the grilling one is to get at the Pearly Gates, but pretty challenging, still. Indeed, how do you explain to this Bangladeshi-born British official the purpose of your visit? I want to touch my cultural and spiritual roots? Not good enough. I want to steep myself in the values that make my presence on this earth tolerable? Whatever, but are you able to finance your stay in the UK? I don’t know. I haven’t tried yet. Are you? Just give me a chance to find out. I’ll be very happy to come back to your booth in a few years’ time and give you a detailed progress report. Maybe then you and I can together figure out the purpose of my visit.
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About the Book
If the boy is the father of the man and his culture is the mother, the boy should be married to his culture. Otherwise, the man they produce will be an illegitimate bastard.
About the Author
Grigori Gerenstein was born in Russia, from where he immigrated to Israel in 1973 and then on to England in 1976. In 2004, he returned to Russia, where he lives now, working as a reporter for Dow Jones Newswire and a number of other international news services. In 1975, Grigori’s collection of short stories The Fall and Other Stories was published by Harper & Row in New York. He has published a number of books, including a collection of Russian stories, The Terrible News, A History of the British Bank of the Middle East, and The Ahasfer Game, the first novel in his Michael Fridman trilogy (by a POD publisher). In 2003, he won the Royal Geographical Society’s Journey of a Lifetime award. Grigori made a BBC documentary and spoke to the Royal Geographic Society on his journey to the Russian Arctic Circle town of Norilsk, where most of the world’s precious metals are mined. Grigori served in two armies, the Soviet army and the Israeli army, and has been engaged in a variety of professions, including scientific research, street cleaning, lexicography, jazz playing on a trumpet, competitive cycling, metal and oil trading, journalism, as well as acting in the theater. He went through a few failed marriages before hope triumphed over experience and he found the woman who could make him happy, which was the reason why he returned to Russia, the place he had made such an effort to get away from. Grigori has completed his Michael Fridman trilogy (Adventures of the Wandering Jew), including The Ahasfer Game, Armageddon According to Mark, and Lucrezia Borgia European Marriage Center, and is halfway into his fourth novel, Machiavelli’s Boss Boris. His main interest is people as products of their history and culture. In our everyday life, whether we are conscious of it or not, our outlook on life, our very grip on reality, and our decisions are determined by everything that has happened in the history of our civilization, and we ignore its lessons at our peril. As one of Grigori’s characters puts it, “If the boy is the father of the man and his culture is the mother, the boy should be married to his culture. Otherwise, the man they produce will be an illegitimate bastard.”