Lev Shneider

I learned to read at four, thanks to my mother, who, before becoming a homemaker, worked as an editor for Emes, a Yiddish paper in postwar Moscow. My first adult book was Spartacus, a six-hundred page volume, which I read to my still-illiterate friends in our backyard. We were all six-year-olds then. At sixteen I taught myself to play the piano and have played, composed and taught music for a living since. Between the gigs I worked as a drilling machine operator, an assembly line worker, a messenger and a data processor. I also sold hairbrushes as the Fuller Brush boy, success seminars and Amway products, handicapped horses for a part of the winnings, read fortunes, and owned three failed businesses. My first attempt at writing took place in 1971 with twelve adult fairy tales broadcast on the Lithuanian State Radio, read by an actor while I played piano in the background. Matryoshka is my second attempt, unless you count the brochures I wrote for a holistic health center where I worked as a gofer for seven bucks an hour.