Marc Ostrovsky is based in Irvine, CA. These stories were written between 1984 and 2020.
He wrote the Warrior Stories and The Demise of Savas in Cambridge, MA, and in Nantucket, MA he wrote the Felt story about a gunslinger and his nemesis the Lone Gunman. He researched the setting for the trial of Savas by walking though and studying the Mt. Auburn Cemetery near Harvard Square.
Afterwards he wrote a companion piece about Savas to show what he was like when younger when hope and promise shown brightly on his brow.
Later in Claremont, CA he wrote about the fall of the Commonwealth Day School almost 30 years after its destruction. He was the real estate broker who sold the historic house at 113 Brattle St., Cambridge to the school. So painful was that episode it required three decades before his anger could subside to a level where he could write about it.
Also a poem appears telling the cautionary tale of when his wife made him a cuckhold. Though shameful it is now told in vivid and trenchant verse.
There are a few more stories on which the author is working. As they come closer to finish, he will post them.
Feb 24, 2020
Marc Ostrovsky learned Greek & Latin at Brandeis University and then studied at Shor Yoshuv Yeshiva and then much later at the Boston Kollel, a place of higher learning with rebeyim that came from New York to Boston to deepen Torah study in that city. He also studied martial arts for many years, in particular, Shim Gum Do, the Mind Sword Path, a Korean Zen mediation and martial art under the founding master Chang Sik Kim.
The Warrior Stories began as porker and dragon jokes, though not ha ha funny, could if one is kind, be allowed onto that sacred ground as jokes. The porker metamorphized into a dragon rather reluctantly and so the stories were born.
Though his writing is utterly different than Tolkien’s, the Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion remain his favorite books of all time. This photo is reminiscent of Hobbiton.
Never before have any of these works been published. This is their first time in the limelight.
The Felt story is about a Jew whom no one recognizes as such, and who finds himself pursued by the Lone Gunman to the literal ends of the earth in Gehenna, a fabulous area of wide dimensions wherein any and everything can be encountered. The Demise of Savas is about another Jew who has lost his soul and tries to determine if there is anything like a soul in a human being, and who find justice in a tomb at Mt Auburn Cemetery, a historic burial ground from pre-Civil War days. The fall of the Commonwealth Day School recounts the tragic denouement of this elementary school at the hands of its well-to-do neighbors including some leading lights at Harvard University who, the author believes, had racist intentions worthy of the worst. Longfellow, the poet, had his house next door to where the school once found its home. He had it built for his daughter who married Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast.
Drawings by Nancy Ostrovsky, 1988
Warrior, Felt, Undertaker, and other stories 