Michael Fryd
Michael Fryd
Author
About
Michael Fryd currently lives and writes in Philadelphia, PA, and 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.
While an American for seven decades, his values, cultural preferences, and love for writing were shaped during
that post-war period.
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At fifteen he and his family were granted entry into the U.S. and settled in a Jewish enclave in the Bronx.
Michael’s early life experience is chronicled in his book, My Mother’s War
which was Bio & Memoir Runner Up in the 2023 Maxxy Awards. It will be published by Story Sanctum in August 2023.
Michael earned a Ph.D. In Chemistry from NYU, and an EdD in group behavior from Temple University. After successful corporate and academic careers, he returned to his early passion, writing.
His short fiction has been published in Intrinsick, Easy Street, Page and Spine, Evening Street Press, UK Short Humour, Little Old Lady Comedy, and Story Sanctum.
He is presently shopping for a publisher for his newest novel, It’s Not Easy to be Green.
Published Work
Story Sanctum | 4/28/2023
Evening Street Review,
Number 29, Mid-Spring 2021
Short Humor | 10/20/2018
Intrinsick | 8/14/2016
Evening Street Review,
Number 20, Spring 2019
Coming in August 2023
My Mother's War stars my indomitable mother, a woman endowed with limitless courage, inborn intelligence, and outsized ambition. Growing up in a small Polish village in the 1920’s she feels 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.
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My Mother's War will be published by Story Sanctum Publishing in August 2023.
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It's Not Easy to be Green
Read a synopsis of, It's Not Easy to Be Green, an unpublished novel by Michael Fryd. Publishers, please use the contact information below to receive a sample chapter.
Five years out of Journalism School Gene (Diogenes) Green, cursed with his ridiculous first name by his father an ancient Greek culture buff who hopes it will inspire him to become a truth-seeker like his philosopher namesake, is a journalist in name only, a stringer for an alternative Philadelphia weekly who supports himself bartending nights at a restaurant rumored to be mob-connected.
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His journalistic antennae tingle when he spots Sonny Donoghue, a powerful local politician talking with an unlikely drinking companion, a scary-looking Russian. If there is a story there, he might finally break down the doors of the journalistic establishment.
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With the help of his two best friends: Nick, a poet whose day job is working for his family business, the local mob, Stephanie, a graduate student in linguistics who pays her bills by stripping on video, and a black biker group, Gene discovers Sonny’s drinking companion is a leader in the Russian mob that smuggles guns and sex slaves from Eastern Europe, and Donoghue is he middleman between him and a drug dealing, outlaw, biker gang.
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His life turns up aces. Not only is he on the verge of a major scoop, but his sister introduces him to the only other hopeless romantic left on earth. However, an old schoolmate he hoped would help him get the story published betrays him and he must go into hiding to avoid the Russians who are out to kill him. While hiding, Gene writes columns in the alternative weekly that expose Donoghue and his partnership with criminals.
The national media picks up his stories and expands on them. Bent on revenge, Donoghue, who can’t find Gene, kidnaps his parents and threatens to kill them unless Gene gives himself up. Gene, not bred to be a hero, must decide between saving his parents’ life or his own. Fortunately, his sister and friends come up with a plan to save him after the exchange. They convince the ATF, the Russian mob expects a gun shipment at the warehouse where they’re likely to take Gene after he gives himself up. By the time the ATF storms the warehouse, the Russians beat and tortured Gene. Wounded during the rescue, he survives and lives to see Donoghue and the mob leaders arrested.
