Joseph Zitt

I’m pleased, proud, and relieved to announce that my father’s novel, Troika, is now in print.

It’s been a process that’s taken over twenty years, counting from the conversation that I had with him that sparked the book, as we sat in a plaza in Tel Aviv in the summer of 1986. While the first draft of the book was complete about ten years later, a wide variety of delays had led it to only being published now.

The official publication date was November 7, the one-year anniversary (according to the Jewish calendar) of my father’s passing. I had let the family know, but held off on a public announcement until I had received a copy of the finished book from the printers. (Fortunately, my father got to see and hold a proof copy in his last days, though he was too tired to look at it for long.)

It’s a spy novel, concerning a coalition of American, Russian, and Israeli agents working together to combat a complex web of nuclear terrorists. It’s a good read, if eccentric in its worldview. But (to paraphrase what my mother said of one of my own books) anyone reading it will get a clear idea of who he was.

We’ve put out the book under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The entire text can be downloaded for free from the Internet Archive, where they promise to keep it available forever.

You can also purchase printed copies from Lulu.com. All proceeds, such as they are, will be donated to a Holocaust archive (as yet undetermined, but probably Yad Vashem).

On a tech/business/whatever note: it doesn’t have an ISBN number, and won’t be available in stores. Lulu.com has an unfortunate limitation (apparently imposed by someone upstream from them and out of their control) that books getting wider distribution and getting ISBNs may only come from PDF files created by Adobe Acrobat. We created this book in Adobe Framemaker, and I unfortunately have an old version (and couldn’t afford an upgrade) that generates buggy PDF files. To get the file into a format that Lulu would accept, I had to process it further using outside, open-source tools. Ironically, the very last stage of the production (done by my niece after I complained about it in a blog post) was done in Acrobat — but by this time, everyone had agreed to do it without the ISBN.

(Bill Bowman has pointed out in a blog comment today that he has successfully published his book via Lulu, ISBN and all. It looks intriguing, and I hope to read it. But I’m also guessing that it will have a much larger audience that we might expect for Troika.)

This project has been somewhat of an albatross for all concerned, and I regret that it’s taken so long. But it’s out now. Take a look — you might enjoy it. And the thought of people reading and enjoying his writing was my father’s dream.

Update: John Cowan asks in a comment about typos and punctuation errors in the book. At this point, I think I’ll consider the text to be immutable. We (my father, another editor, and I) spent much of the past decade shooting down typos and restraining his tendency to put commas after just, about, every, word. I think we’ll, at the very least, take an extended break before thinking about Troika 2.0.

As it is, I’ve found a problem with the text version up on the Internet Archive. When Framemaker exported the supposed ASCII of the book, it used those @#$%^)(* “smart quotes”, which turn into question marks when viewed in Firefox and were shown as octal codes when I looked at it late last night in Emacs. I’m not clear if (or how) one can submit an updated version of a text to the Internet Archive. And the process of getting the file from my version of Framemaker to a usable PDF was insane (figuring it out was one of the things that slowed the project by several months), and I’m loath to try it again.

Maybe I should open a Bugzilla project on the text, so we can collect typos and punctuation errors for a second edition.

(And now, having followed a stream of consciousness in pursuit of a gag that I ended up not using in this post, I’m off to Wikipedia to fix a glitch in their mention of John Cage in their entry about Finnegans Wake. )