Louis Begley

The Late Bloomer

Louis Begley survived the Holocaust in a plot straight out of the movies. But the successful Manhattan attorney waited nearly 50 years before setting out to chronicle his breathtaking story in a semi-autobiographical novel.

Louis Begley is what one might call a literary late developer.

Born in Stryj, Poland, in 1933, Ludwik Begleiter emigrated to America with his parents in 1947 and attended high school in Brooklyn. After being naturalized as an American citizen in 1953 and Anglicizing his name, he became a Harvard-trained lawyer.

For years, Begley put all of his energy into a successful legal career at a prestigious Manhattan law firm. Then, at the age of 56, when most men start thinking about retirement, he set about writing his first novel: Wartime Lies.

Unfinished business

By then a senior partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, Begley bought himself a laptop, took a four-month sabbatical and locked himself away in his weekend residence in The Hamptons to write.

The result was the tale of a nine-year-old Polish Jew, Maciek, who escapes the Nazis by posing as a gentile. The novel is semi-autobiographical and recalls Begley's own experience as a Jew in wartime Poland.

After Begley's grandparents were shot and killed in Poland, he and his mother used fake IDs identifying themselves as Catholic Poles in order to escape the same Holocaust fate. Describing his experience in writing the book to "The New York Times," Begley said: "I am unwilling to separate incidents in my book that may be said to have happened to me or that I have witnessed from those I have imagined."

The book's success turned Begley into an overnight literary sensation. Wartime Lies won The American Book Award, the Hemmingway/PEN Award and the top French literary prize for literature in translation, the Prix Médicis Étranger. Begley finds nothing remarkable about jump-starting his literary career so late in life. "I think it would be highly unlikely that one would successfully begin writing poetry at the age of 56. But novels are different,“ he once told an interviewer.

"I had a story to tell"

Despite having dealt with his personal history in the novel, Begley says he has no desire to return to Poland other than to make the occasional visit as an author. "I'm only involved with Poland on the level of language and literature," he recently told DW-RADIO. "My entire family, with the exception of my parents, was killed in World War II. Everyone I know, except for a few boys from my high school, is dead. I have no human relations in Poland. I now have no roots except for linguistic and literary ones -- and, of course, things you can never expunge, like my childhood."

Though some of the themes in the novel have emerged in subsequent books, Begley has also written about the upper echelons of society and the corporate world. "I wrote the book that I wrote because I had a story to tell, and I wanted to do so in an artistic way," Begley told a "New York Times" interviewer. "But now I am rather finished with that." Still, some of the themes from Begley's own life -- encountering anti-Semitism, surviving the Holocaust, immigrating to America and finding success -- are threads woven into his recent works.