PERSONAL STORY

I was born in sunny Stanford in 1968, into an oasis of middle-class Californian tranquillity. David Berlinski, my father, is an essayist, celebrated wit and bon vivant; my mother, Toby Saks, is a classically trained cellist. My grandparents were musicians, refugees from the Nazis who crossed every border from Danzig to Bilbao in their flight from Europe.

Shortly after my birth, my family returned to Manhattan’s upper West Side. My parents tell me now that they were oblivious to the political turmoil of the sixties and early seventies and I believe it; the only event of my childhood remotely suggestive of the epoch, and this only barely, was the New York Philharmonic musician’s strike. I remember sitting outside Lincoln Center, skinned knees swinging, my younger brother asleep in a baby carriage, my mother elegant in dark sunglasses, her hair swept up into an elaborate bouffant. I believe my father was at home in our air-conditioned apartment committing himself to deep thoughts. A few vivid visual memories remain: picket signs that proclaimed the workers’ unity of Musicians’ Local 101, an adult – a violinist named Pinky – who showed me how to filet a leaf from a gingko tree and affix it with sap to the tip of my nose. Nothing more.

My peripatetic family returned to the West Coast several years later, this time to sunless Seattle. Jump-cut to 1981, when I entered at the University of Washington at age of thirteen under the auspices of a radical educational acceleration program, the experimental creation of the head of the university’s child psychology department, a man much under the influence of John Stuart Mill. I am often asked if my social life suffered as a consequence. Not really. I’m not sure that I missed much by missing high school; in any event I wouldn’t know; certainly, those years were the backbone of my subsequent academic development.

Following the completion of my teenage years and undergraduate studies, I spent a year backpacking through Latin America, the Middle East and Europe. I worked for a time as a fille au pair in Paris, spent a short spell on an Israeli kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee, and enjoyed a brief – very brief – career as a dormitory warden in a Swiss boarding school. I then won a scholarship to study at Balliol College of Oxford University, where I passed the next seven glorious years, taking a First Class degree in Modern History, then a Masters Degree in International Relations, then a Doctorate in the same subject. I wrote an involved dissertation on the formation of the United States’ arms transfer policy toward the Arab-Israeli protagonists in the wake of the June 1967 War, conducting research in the manuscript rooms of America’s beautifully-tended Presidential archives. The thesis has now passed into obscurity. Oxford itself was everything Oxford is said to be, a place and time for which I shall be forever nostalgic, tender and grateful. Thatcher, of course, was in power.

Upon coming down from Oxford in 1995, I took a job as a journalist and editor in the Bangkok newsroom of the upstart Asia Times, an pan- Asian daily with correspondents from Kathmandu to Sydney. The paper was a toy, a piece of splendid vanity for the billionaire Thai publishing magnate who conceived the money-devouring project as his flagship and legacy. For a brief brilliant time, cash and capital flowed like a mudslide throughout Southeast Asia. I was there to reap the benefit. We all knew it was too good to last. I shall forever treasure the memory of discussing Vietnam’s impending admission to ASEAN with my Editor-in-Chief over drinks at the Patpong Road whorehouse he owned as a hedge against the paper’s failure, the two of us attempting seriously to consider the prospects for the development of the Vietnamese bond market while a barely-clad barfly danced enthusiastically on the table top. One year later the paper collapsed in the Great Crash, along with everything else; I am told that the publishing titan shaved his head, joined a monastery, and took to the streets of Bangkok with a begging bowl.

I had by that point escaped to Vientiane, the capitol of the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos, where I worked for a time for the United Nations Development Program. I was deeply enamored of Vientiane, with the sagging mansions built by French colonists, with the mysterious curled script, with the antique merchants who sold porcelain opium pipes that resembled flutes. My marble terrace overlooked a lush garden of mango and papaya trees and a dilapidated Buddhist temple; in the mornings I could hear the ringing of bells and chanting of the monks over its golden spires. At nightfall the scent of jasmine entered my bedroom from the open window, where the ceiling fan stirred the fragrance into scented eddies. I left Laos deeply dispirited by development work and its discontents, having discovered that the bulk of the foreign aid I supervised had been committed to upholstering the UN Resident Representative’s mansion with tropical hardwood furniture. When I departed, Laos was certainly no better off than when I found it, although I was wiser and sadder.

In 1996 I returned to California, taking a teaching job at Santa Clara University, a pretty little college with palm trees, and managing for a time the California operations of the Voter News > > Service, the news agency that infamously awarded the election to George Bush, Al Gore, and George Bush again all in one night. I stress that I had nothing to do with that. Following this peaceful episode, I took a job for an unknown consulting firm near Langley, Virginia, where I came into contact with the characters who inspired Loose Lips – about whom I am permitted to say no more.

I now divide my time between Paris and Istanbul, where I have devoted myself full-time to writing.

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