Welcome to My Family History Novels!

After retiring from a long career as a law professor, I was able to pursue my dream of writing a novel. I had started doing genealogy and family history research a few years before retiring, and I had learned a number of facts and stories about my ancestors.

Pacific Street was my first novel, inspired by the lives of my grandparents and their families. It was a labor of love. It is a story for our times—a story about how immigrants adapted to America, about how much America gave to them, and about how much they gave to America.

My second book, Santa Fe Love Song, was inspired by my great-great-grandparents Bernard Seligman and Frances Nusbaum. Bernard was a young man who came to the US from a small town in Germany and became a real life American pioneer on the Santa Fe Trail. Frances was a first-generation American raised in Philadelphia who had to choose between her family and life in Philadelphia and the man she loved who wanted to take her all the way to New Mexico.

My third novel, Simon’s Secret, is a story inspired by the lives of two of my Goldschmidt relatives, Simon and his daughter Hannah. Simon came to the US in the 1840s with a secret, one he wanted to hide from his family and his new country. His daughter Hannah never understood why he was such a curmudgeon. What was Simon’s secret? Will Hannah ever find out? And will she understand her father better if she does?