Why This Story and Not Another?

To tell all the stories that pass through my mind I would need a hundred lifetimes. My novels have each taken years to complete. You, Fascinating You has consumed fully one-tenth of my life. Its seed was planted more than twenty years ago, when I first met Cesare Frustaci.

Reflecting later upon that meeting, I identified Cesare’s defining feature: regardless of where he made his home, he was unplaceable. He spoke with an accent, not Hungarian exactly, but not Italian either. Unlike his fellow émigrés, he had no wistful memories of Hungary, no desire to return.

I remember sharing a meal with him in a restaurant. There was something about the way he ate I had never before observed: although his table manners could not have been more refined, he appeared to be starving. Immediately upon finishing a course, he would signal the waitress and order a second helping—only to cancel the order moments later.

As we got to know each other, details of his childhood began to emerge—the malnutrition he suffered during World War II, the “shoes” he fashioned for himself from horses’ feedbags, the corpses alongside which he would awaken each morning… He seemed to be describing the perils of an orphaned waif abandoned to his fate, yet he was the son of Pasquale Frustaci (aka the “Italian Cole Porter”), a composer and conductor whose star, while the war cast Europe into darkness, had never shone brighter. How then, from the age of seven, did Cesare end up alone on the battlefronts of provincial Hungary in the midst of the worst carnage the world has known?

The answer would arrive in my mailbox fifteen years later: a videotaped oral history Cesare contributed to Yale University. It told the story of his mother Margit Wolf, a Jewish ballerina who fell in love with a dashing Italian maestro and bore him a son—a ballerina who inspired an international anthem to longing only to fade from history without a trace. I sat riveted, as if hearing the libretto of a classic ballet or opera, but this was memory—the memory of a hungry boy searching for his parents.

Why this story? Because it gripped my heart and would not let go. Because I lay awake nights thinking of Margit Wolf and hearing “You, Fascinating You” broadcast through my pillow. Because this is what great stories do: make us care.