11/11/99

The trainman who could

    Dov Silverman was a Brooklyn slum bum, a dumb kid in school, a brawlin' street fighter, and at the age of 17, a Marine. Not much of a future for this guy, so when he got a job as a Long Island Railway conductor, he seemed to top out. The best you could say about him is that he stayed out of jail. 
    For 18 years he chugged back and forth along the track.
    One night, all of a sudden, he derailed. (Dov, not the train.)
    "Yeah. I met God." He says so apologetically, because it's a red herring that kind of spoils a good story. "Sorry about that," he chuckles softly, "I know, it's so un-me.
    "What happened was, I came home at one or two in the morning. I had my canteen, and my railroad lantern; I hadn't been drinking. And I, y'know --" he pauses, and shrugs,
"-- met God."

DOV'S LIFE is a bundle of contradictions. Nothing, absolutely nothing in his personal time-line leads to a logical conclusion. Like a battery that inexplicably works better when you reverse the + and the -, his is a story of diametric polarities. 
    The tip-off is when he recites Shakespeare in a dull-witted Brooklyn accent, a thick-tongued, gravelly-voiced burble of poetic words emanating from a battler's battered face. The confirmation is his encounter with God. The clincher is the shelfful of Japanese literature in his home, because -- and this is where it gets really weird -- they all bear the byline "Dov Silverman."
    The tough ex-Marine and ex-railroader -- who could easily have turned out to be an ex-convict -- became an extraordinary writer. 
    None of it makes sense. God chooses to reveal Himself to a thoroughly Jewishless trainman. This fellow then decides to follow a path of intense study -- of Japan. He quits the railroad to become a writer. He moves to Safed -- which does make sense, because it is a magnet for mystics and messianics -- but he becomes one of the few of God's Chosen to spurn religion and maintain a secular lifestyle.
    Not the usual pattern.
    Then, from his new home on a Galilee mountaintop, he thinks maybe he can write a richly evocative adventure epic about a 19th century shogun. No publisher in his right mind would even answer Dov's letters, right?
    Anyway, it turns out the publishers go gaga, he writes, they publish, the book sells, a sequel comes out and another and ANOTHER, and Dov Silverman doesn't care anymore that some guy got his job on the Long Island Railroad.
    A guy whose curriculum vitae includes "flamethrower, machinegunner and tankman" from his combat days in Korea, and "diesel-engine repairman and railway conductor" simply does not go on to become a best-selling, prize-winning, Safed-based writer about historical Japan who dropped out of school and couldn't even type!   

DOV'S LITERARY adventure began with a slim novel, ג€œLegends of Safed.ג€ He would soon become one himself.
    Having resumed his education -- clinching a high school diploma and going all the way to graduating cum laude from Stoney Brook University -- he took a writing course, and he was off. 
    His maiden novel, ג€œThe Fall of the Shogun,ג€ so impressed his British publisher that Dov was awarded a five-book contract. The historical-fiction series has sold 100,000 copies, the first three appearing for several weeks at about 20th place on the London Times bestseller list. They have been translated into Hebrew, Japanese, Polish and German.
    The shogun novels are critically acclaimed in Japan, Dov says. "The former Japanese ambassador and his wife read the books, and recommended them to all the embassies as a way to understand Japan. Well, until the last one. I had a bad guy named Hideoshi, but [the real] Hideoshi was like the George Washington of Japan. And the ambassador's wife was upset about this."
    In the midst of it all, responding to criticism, he wrote another book. ג€œRevenge of the Good Shepherdsג€ was about the US, Ireland and Israel, and it won a prize -- ironically, in Japan.
    "I don't read 'doity books'," he giggles, "and reviewers seemed to be consistent in their criticism: I didn't know how to write about sex and violence. Now, I'm an ex-Marine, and I'm married, and y'know, my manhood was threatened! So I sat down and worked on it, got it out of my system.
    "And Janet (his wife) sent it off to a contest in Japan, and it won the mystery fiction award. But to me, ha ha, it's a sex-and-violence thriller." 
    Dov, 66 years old, now lives in Ra'anana. He works methodically, taking about a year to crank out a book. He sticks to a railwayman's schedule, eating breakfast, then writing until lunch, followed by a nap, regular exercise, and late at night, he edits. While he's writing, Janet is reviewing and editing -- a collaborative effort; before a book is considered complete, "Janet reads it aloud to me 11 or 12 times."
    Even when words fail him, he's at his desk. "I always have something to do: I write character dossiers, or I fool around with the time-line. I also keep a record of each character's action and [subsequent] reaction."
    Amazingly, everything is handwritten. Janet used to take his "sloppy" longhand script (he doesn't even bother with punctuation) and tap them into a manual typewriter; after three books, they splurged and bought an electric typewriter. Eventually, Janet got fed up, and Dov, though still writing longhand, now types in the scribble himself -- into a computer. 
    Tedious? Not on your life. Dov lights up, and like a scufflin' inner-city kid who's become a major league ballplayer, he exclaims in raspy Brooklynese: "I wanna write. When I'm writin' I'm happy as a pig in shit, I'm tellin' ya, heh, heh! Oh boy, this is fun!"

AFTER WRITING these seven books, "and a few others that are still in the closet," Dov is now on a different train of thought: a study of the American dam projects. Just what you wouldn't expect.
    The incongruities of his life are, at least, consistently congruous. Which brings us back to 1966, and The God Thing.
    It had a merely nebulous effect on him. "There was nothing religious about it. It set me on a path of truth, that's all." The episode scared the heck out of him -- and still does -- but "I received no message. I just woke up intellectually."
    God happens.
    On the other hand, the fleeting appearance of an anonymous old woman did  have a lasting effect.
    "I remember one day walking with my mother, I was a little boy,  and she looks across the street and sees a woman. And she says, 'Oh, that poor woman.' I only saw a woman with a coat. She said, 'Look at her shoes, how they're run down, and the heels, she doesn't have money to fix them, and look at her hair, and her pocketbook, it's so worn, and the way she holds it so close to her, whatever money she has, and it can't be very much....' My mother saw all this."
    It's something Dov has never forgotten. "That's what I've been learning to do: to learn to see. We looked at that same woman, and my mother saw a whole story."