Ronald Florence

the author of ten books. I've written about a WWI assassin, women socialists, transatlantic flights on the Graf Zeppelin, racing and cruising sailboats, the Gypsy holocaust, the Palomar telescope, the last season before WWII in Newport, the Damascus blood libel, Lawrence of Arabia and Aaron Aaronsohn, and an effort to rescue as many as one million Jews from the Holocaust. Several of my books have been published in foreign editions, and one is the basis of a PBS documentary.

I was educated at Berkeley and Harvard, where I received my PhD. Before turning to full-time writing, I taught at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence and Purchase College; was a research fellow and executive director of foundations; reviewed for the Los Angeles Times and journals; and raised Cotswold sheep for twelve years in Stonington, Connecticut. I now live in Providence, Rhode Island with my wife, an intellectual property lawyer. When I'm not writing, I bake bread, work on Habitat and with classical music groups, travel in Europe and the Middle East to research my books, and play with my granddaughter.

I am currently working on a novel about two ancient manuscripts, a definitive Hebrew bible and an unusual Jewish prayer book for women, and how they intertwine with the lives and dreams of ordinary people — a widow in Brooklyn, a young girl and her father in 14th century Provence, the beadle of an Aleppo synagogue, an OSS spy in post-war France, a young Frenchwoman yearning for a new life in Israel, a clerk in Weimar on the eve of the collapse of the DDR, a coffee trader in Amsterdam, and a lonely wife in the papal territories in France who sees an answer to her longings in the false messiah Sabbatai Zvi.