Hesh kestin biography of michael

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Hesh Kestin

An honors graduate of the Brooklyn streets, where he grew up across from the former headquarters of Murder Inc., Hesh Kestin reported on war, crime and terrorism in the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

You might know I write. Those who think this funny never faced an oncoming Buddy the Body Builder.

A YEAR IN READING

For years I’ve had the extreme displeasure of throwing new fiction across the room and seeing it fall apart.

But with immigrant parents who worked overtime and a brother eight years my senior, pretend was just the natural thing to do when I was on my own (ESPN, WWW., and HDTV were still random assortments of letters). In this shrewdly penned thriller, an Egyptian nobleman takes it on the lam after knocking off one of Pharaoh’s brutal overseers.

And that’s only the caper. But as a kid, those bricks and windows composed the perimeter of an intergalactic HQ. I built forts, tinkered with invisible force fields, and survived countless alien offensives.*

I'm thankful for that house as those long afternoons of play established the foundation for today's. His work has appeared in publications as diverse as Forbes, Newsday, the Jerusalem Post and Playboy.

Questions from the audience and Hesh's spirited replies round out the evening.

The very idea seems at once perverse and nonsensical, like gay plumbers or red-haired Japanese.
Call it "creative."

I still think of it as pretend. You might know I founded Armed Mind.

What happens next would make a hell of a movie. Launched just right, the spine splits and signatures or – if they’re paperbacks – pages shake out like, well, like bad fiction: unconnected, insubstantial, rank. Unless otherwise identified, quotes are from personal correspondence with the author.

"YA WANNA DO IT HERE OR DOWN THE STATION, PUNK?"

LP: What crime novel would you most like to have written?

HK: ‘Exodus’, and not the one by Leon Uris.

Releases

Hi There

Looks like you've stumbled on my humble homepage. After hanging up his trenchcoat Kestin founded two prize-winning newspapers, the independent Israeli daily The Nation, and The American, a weekly for expatriates. You might even know I support non-profits.

But I'm really just doing what I did then.

The old man loved libraries, had worked in one at the University of Warsaw during his bohemian days when, in the months before the Nazi onslaught –he escaped on the last ship out of the free port of Danzig—he wrote poetry and tried to get on at one of the Polish capital’s Yiddish papers. "You never stop being afraid," Kestin says of a former life in which he was often the only unarmed man in the room.

Then, after having discovered the secret of his birth, he blackmails the bossman himself by hitting him with plague after plague until the big hood finally relents: In history’s greatest heist, the newly minted but fast-thinking yid walks off with the equivalent of a couple billion quid [figuring the average slave was a cool thou] plus livestock and uncounted treasure.

In fact, say hi! “But having grown up in a Brooklyn neighborhood where every day was a war, I had a unique advantage: I was used to it.”

After hanging up his trenchcoat, Hesh published four works of fiction and, most recently, one of controversial faction.

The father of five, Hesh lives close to New York City in a very quiet village where, he reports, gunfire is blessedly rare.

HESH KESTIN ON PBS

Interviewed on Public Television's "The Open Mind" on The Intelligence of Imagination, Hesh talks about journalism as the first draft of history, compared to fiction as a history of the future. Plus, he gets to tell his favorite joke about Israel and the CIA.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

In Lisa Peet’s profile of “recovering journalist” Hesh Kestin, he was generously forthcoming about growing up in Brooklyn, 20 years as a foreign correspondent, and his philosophy of writing.

Below are a few more thoughts from Kestin, rounding out a portrait of a life well lived, and a writer with a strong sense of where he came from.