Grigori Gerenstein: 4 books

Michael Fridmans mother, who lives in Israel, is a nonsmoking, mature, professional Jewish widow with a sense of humor and a son who never lives up to her expectations. Her new boyfriend, Mark Schtirlitz, is a fat slob of a brandy-guzzling failure of a musician with a secret missionhe is composing a musical with a working title Armageddon.

San Gimignano in Tuscany is a place where the wandering Jews longing to belong becomes especially acute. Here among the shadows of the past and real descendants of those shadows, he finds his peace.

Russian tycoon Boris Kievsky is not mad but he is afraid of what money and power can do to his grip on reality. When pressures of work and marriage become unsupportable, he escapes into the fictional world of Renaissance, where he befriends Niccolo Machiavelli and commits heroic deeds to win the favor...

If the boy is the father of the man and his culture is the mother, the boy should be married to his culture. Otherwise, the man they produce will be an illegitimate bastard.