I was thinking today about the quote from the wonderful novel, "The Green Tent," by Lyudmila Ulitskaya: "It is fascinating to trace the trajectories of people destined to meet." It is amazing how people who come into our lives and change them. It's as if they are all part of a larger unseen story, a fabric of story beneath our very lives. I felt that way when I was a student in the Soviet Union in the 1980's and met so many wonderful young Soviet Jews, who ultimately changed the course of my life. In my novel, Forget Russia, I seek to recreate all that they meant to me.