Louis Begley
| Louis Begley | |
|---|---|
Begley in 2003
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| Born |
Ludwik Begleiter October 6, 1933 (age 83) Stryj, Polish Republic |
| Spouse(s) | Sally Higginson (1956–1970; divorced) Anka Muhlstein (1974–present) |
Louis Begley (born October 6, 1933) is a Jewish American novelist. He is best known for writing the semi-autobiographical Holocaust novel, Wartime Lies (1991), and the Schmidt trilogy: About Schmidt (1996), Schmidt Delivered (2000) and Schmidt Steps Back (2012).
Begley was born Ludwik Begleiter in Stryi at the time part of the Polish Republic and now in Ukraine, as the only child of a physician. Using forged identity papers that enabled them to pretend to be Polish Catholics, his mother and he survived the almost wholly successful German attempt to kill all Polish Jews.
He lived with his mother at first in Lwów, and then in Warsaw until the end of the August 1944 Warsaw uprising. By the time World War II ended, they were in Kraków, where they were reunited with Begley’s father.
During the school year 1945/46, Begley attended the Jan Sobieski gimnazjum in Kraków. It was his first experience of formal instruction since kindergarten during Soviet occupation of Stryj, which followed German invasion of western Poland in 1939.
The family left Poland in the fall of 1946 for Paris and, in late February 1947, left Paris for New York City, arriving March 3, 1947. Shortly afterward, the family name was changed from Begleiter to Begley. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, Begley studied English Literature at Harvard College (AB '54, summa cum laude). Whilst at Harvard he worked on The Advocate, an undergraduate literary magazine. Service in the United States Army followed, the last eighteen months of it in Göppingen, Germany, with the 9th Division.
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