Featured Interview With Eric Houston
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I believe I can safely say that I’m the best-looking concert pianist turned writer from the Long Ridge side of North Stamford, Connecticut. So far that’s uncontested. I now live in New York City, where my little apartment hardly fits me, much less a pet, but animals have played an important part of my life.
When I was six years old, my older sister and I began walking to school. After passing the foreboding graveyard, we came upon a small red house with a large black boxer/lab mix chained to a tree. Watching him ferociously bark and lunge for us as we passed, I’d never seen a dog so powerful and beautiful. Each day his barking and pulling became more ferocious, until one day he broke the chain. Seeing him dart like a rocket straight towards me, my sister yelled, “Eric, watch out!” But I was too frozen to move. Instead of ripping me to shreds, which he could have easily done, he began jumping all over me with uncontrollable excitement. My sister began hitting him with a book yelling, “Bad dog! Down! Down!” but even that couldn’t stop him. I loved it. I thought, “This is how everyone should greet me.”
Somehow, he knew that we were meant to be together. For the next few months, we were almost inseparable. He’d wait for me outside of my classroom, and I’d sit in the back by the window so that we could see each other. That summer, while we were away on a family vacation, his owners moved, taking him with them. During the entire vacation, I had looked forward to getting back to him. It was an incredibly hard blow to find out that I’d never see him again.
Then a miracle happened. His owners called to ask if we still wanted him. He was sick, and his owners didn’t want to pay for a vet. The money was also an issue to my parents, but knowing how much he meant to me, my parents agreed to take him. It was the happiest day of my life. The vet warned that he might not make it, but I knew he would. He was too powerful and had too much fight in him. Now that we were finally together, he just couldn’t die.
Still, it was an incredible relief when he was given the clear, and his recovery was just more proof that he was a super dog. I immediately changed his name from the unsuitable Pepper to Hector, the Trojan prince. Hector was more than my best friend. He was my hero and my guardian angel. I couldn’t understand my incredible luck that he would chose me as his friend. He somehow looked past all of my inadequacies and greeted me with such passion that we had to put a Band-Aid on the end of his tail to prevent it from whipping blood on the walls.
As a child, it seemed an eternity away for Hector to grow old. I was ill prepared for him to die of brain cancer when I was fifteen. To this day, I still have the occasional dream that Hector didn’t die. He was just out wandering the neighborhood and comes home. It is a wonderful dream. I never question how unrealistically old Hector would be now, but then I wake up.
Our relationship mirrored to some extent one part of my father’s story in “The Lost Artist.”
In 1934, my father was thirteen when he escaped Nazi Germany by going alone to Palestine. Without family or friends in a foreign, hostile land, it was a difficult time for him. But one day, he saw a magnificent, black Arabian horse running in a field. To get a better look, he walked out into the field, and the horse began charging him. Terrified, he froze as the horse stopped practically on top of him. Slowly and cautiously my father tried petting him. Soon the horse was nuzzling his chest and playing with him in the field, when a farmer yelled out from a distance, “Get away from that horse! He’s a killer!”
Until then, no one had been able to get near the horse, Amon. For whatever reason, Amon only trusted my father. Until WWII separated them, they were best friends. They did everything together. The horse that no one could get near was plowing fields, scouting the area with my father, and working with him in the Haganah to bring in illegal Jewish immigrants. It was only because of Amon, through a bizarre series of events, that my father met King Abdullah of Jordan, WWII’s most important Arab ally to the British. It’s a miracle that my father survived the war. Without King Abdullah’s protection, he would have undoubtedly been killed early on in the North African Campaign.
I described my father meeting Amon exactly as he told it to me, but because of Hector, I understood how he felt. I knew what it was like for a skinny kid who didn’t fit in to have a magnificent animal, for no explicable reason, choose you as his friend. Many have said that Amon is one of their favorite parts of “The Lost Artist.”
My father and I talked a lot before he died of lung cancer in 2006. He was telling me about one exploit with Amon when he said, “It’s amazing. So many years have passed, but he’s still so clear to me. It’s as if we’ve barely been apart.” I told him about my recurring dream of Hector, and he admitted having a similar dream about Amon. We both had many wonderful relationships with other animals, but nothing quite matched what we had then. How could it? Could we ever be that young again to believe in forever?
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
When I was five, I was blown away by Maurice Sendak’s “Nutshell Library.” We can never go back, but I still remember the passion I felt for it. Great art says a lot with a little, and it’s a perfect example. At age ten, I wrote my first book, a fantasy adventure about Hector and me. It wasn’t very good, but the kids kept asking the teacher to read it, probably to get out of schoolwork. Curiously, at age ten, my father illustrated his first book about a bee, “Queen Maya.” His teacher liked it so much that he asked if he could keep it. My father agreed but was heartbroken to hand it over. I wish I could’ve seen it, but it was probably lost in the war.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love to explore different worlds, so historical fiction and nonfiction are probably my favorite genres. As far as inspiration goes, it amazes me that Jane Austen wrote “Pride and Prejudice” over 200 years ago. There are so many reasons why it’s a timeless masterpiece: perfect three-act structure (not coined until 1979 by Syd Field), compelling drama with characters you care about in unfair situations, brilliant dialogue that is always true to the characters, and, of course, her timeless sense of humor that flows so naturally from the characters. Many writers inspire me: John le Carré, Daphne du Maurier, Graham Greene, and Moss Hart, to name a few. Some I’ve recently discovered: Dov Zeller, Lara Lillibridge, and Jennifer Haupt. Since they inspire me, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jane Austen hadn’t also inspired them.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My new book is entitled “The Lost Artist: Love Passion War (Part 1).”
Having escaped Nazi Germany by going along to Palestine at the age of thirteen, my father became a WWII war hero in the British commandos, but his passion was art.
I knew he had a remarkable story, but I felt too far removed to write it. Besides what he told me, what did I know about the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, Palestine before the State of Israel, WW II’s North African Campaign, the No. 2 Commando, etc.? I’m used to researching a subject until I’m comfortable enough to write about it, but this seemed overwhelming.
Then in 2010, I received an email from Einat Amitay, a top computer scientist with a chair at IBM Israel, saying, “You may not know this, but your father is very famous in Israel.” At first, I thought it was a scam, but as I read on, she talked about a children’s book that my father had illustrated, “And There Was Evening” (“Vayehi Erev”) (ויהי ער). I knew the book because my father had brought it back from his one trip to Israel in the early 90’s. In early 1948, he had turned in the illustrations right before leaving Palestine/Israel for New York City and never gave it any more thought.
He showed me the book in disbelief. “It’s a miracle. The book was actually published, and this one little bookstore somehow got the leftover copies from the 1950’s printing.”
I told Einat that during our first Skype conversation. She laughed, saying, “He could’ve walked into any bookstore and found it. It’s everywhere.” It never crossed his mind that the book could have had more than one printing, much less become a bestseller and timeless classic, now in its 42nd edition, referred to as the pearl of Israeli children’s literature. After a sixty-year ongoing search for the artist, Einat, while dying of breast cancer, had joined the mission and, against all odds, finally solved the mystery.
The story was now too much for me to resist. Einat was a great support. I was very moved by her story of finding my dad and wanted to tell it as a present-day backdrop to telling his story. We became close friends as we chatted often on Skype. Though she made it clear that her chances of survival were slight, she was so vital, such a wonderful person, and had such determination that it was hard for me to accept. How many people dying of breast cancer would have the determination to join a 60-year search for a lost artist of a favorite children’s book and be the one to actually succeed?! I will always be incredibly grateful to her. On her blog, you can see how much she did for so many, especially for children. I can’t say how much her search for my father has meant to my family and me. I only wish my father could have known her, but he died a few years before. She felt his spirit was pushing her, so maybe they know each other now. I hope so.
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