Tribal Diaries

In 1990, I left Moscow embarking on the cross-Atlantic journey that landed me in New York. I was carrying a guitar, a suitcase, a backpack and three hundred dollars. My passage to the West had begun. I traversed the back roads of America and Germany not frequented by too many outsiders playing music in many odd places. I came across a variety of fascinating people living in their unique settings. How many soulful conversations enhanced by good tea, coffee, beer, vodka and other pleasant liquids we shared at the seemingly random intersections of time and space. All these experiences merged into stories. The West Bank Story is a look back at the predicament of growing up Jewish in Moscow. Cristiania is a snapshot of a vast, vibrant, and well-organized squatters' paradise in Copenhagen. In the process of working on this book, I came to realize that we all are uniquely the same. Now I want to share with you the people I met and the worlds they live in. *** Let us go then, you and I, on a road trip of the mind with Russian born poet Misha Feign. Standing on the outside of our culture looking in at what Henry Miller called "the air conditioned nightmare," Feign has written a series of stories which help us view what might be familiar with fresh eyes. *** Harold Maier, the founder of Twice Told