Fifty years ago, fresh out of university, I went to work as a journalist in western Massachusetts. There was just one problem: I was suffering from a serious case of wanderlust. Luckily, after a couple of years, I stumbled upon a cure: I became an American diplomat, a career that allowed me to serve my country - and satisfy my desire to see the world. Over the next three and a half decades - along with my wife and, eventually, our three daughters - I lived and worked in nine countries, visited dozens more, met presidents and prime ministers, got unceremoniously tossed off the back of a yak on a trip to the Himalayas and, in 2007, was sworn in as the U.S. Ambassador to Yemen. 

Yemen figures prominently in my first novel: its complicated history and its present-day turmoil. It is a story of people searching for elusive goals. The more than 50,000 Yemeni Jews who emigrated to Israel in the years immediately after the state's creation were longing for a new life in The Promised Land. The young American journalist who travels to Yemen 60 years later is hunting for what sometimes seems to him to be buried treasure: a prized collection of handmade jewelry one of the emigres - a gifted silversmith named Moishe Azani - was forced to leave behind as he departed in 1949.   

My novel is entitled "The Silversmith's Secret." Its expected publication date is March 2025.  I hope you'll have as much fun reading it as I did writing it.