Michael Fryd

Michael's early life experience is chronicled in his 2023 memoir, My Mother’s War, a Bio & Memoir Runner Up in the 2023 Maxxy Awards.

Kirkus Reviews called My Mother's War, “Engrossing and immersive…a candid and compelling multigenerational account.”

Eva’s Secret is Michael’s debut novel, an homage to women who find the strength to triumph over societal oppression. Eva's Secret was awarded honorable mention in the Faulkner-Wisdom 2025 Literary Competition.

His short fiction has been published in Intrinsick, Easy Street, Page and Spine, Evening Street Press, UK Short Humor, and Story Sanctum.

He is currently looking for a publisher for Eva’s Secret. You can contact Michael at michaelfryd@comcast.net.

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Michael currently lives and writes in Philadelphia, PA. He was born in Poland in 1936 to a small-town Jewish family. He and his parents spent the war years hiding from the Nazis in a local farmer’s root cellar. After the war, his parents left Poland and settled in a Paris residential hotel/bordello where they lived for five years while waiting for a visa to the United States.

At fifteen, he and his family were granted entry into the U.S. and settled in a Jewish enclave in the Bronx. While an American for seven decades, his values, cultural preferences, and love for writing were shaped during that post-war period.

Michael earned a Ph.D. In Chemistry from NYU, and an Ed.D. in group behavior from Temple University. After successful corporate and academic careers, he returned to his early passion, writing.

My Mother's War

My Mother's War stars my indomitable mother, Evelyn Fryd, a woman endowed with limitless courage, inborn intelligence, and outsized ambition. Growing up in a small Polish village in the 1920s, she felt suffocated and blocked by the patriarchal power structure of her Jewish community.

Determined to get an education and access to the larger world, she uses cunning and a flexible attitude toward truth to circumvent the obstacles in her path and reach her goals.

She uses these same skills, augmented by a loss of respect for the law, which did nothing to protect her from the Nazis, to save her family from the Holocaust, and after the war, to rebuild their lives as they flee the killing fields of Warsaw to Paris and finally New York.

My Mother's War was published by Story Sanctum Publishing in July 2023.