Following Friday Night Prayer Services.
Until he was well into his sixties, Michael Oren was an academic and diplomatic Israeli American star: scholar, author, political figure and Israeli ambassador to the United States. He lectured as a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown even as he taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. And his books on US-Israeli relations, US involvement in the Middle East and the Six Day War all became New York Times bestsellers.
Even when he turned to fiction in 2004, Oren remained in place, with a collection of short stories set in the Negev.
But Oren’s new novel, Swann’s War, is a bold departure, a mystery set during World War II on a rugged New England fishing island with nary a Jew or Arab in sight. And the arc of the narrative has nothing to do with international politics but with the murder of an Italian prisoner of war and the unlikely team of islanders who attempt to solve it.
Ambassador Oren joins us to discuss how writing has long been his method to de-stress and how stories like Swann’s War provide him a different way to serve.
“I’m trying to be free,” he says, “to be disciplined, and to say something important.”