Books by Stephen Weiss
The year is 1097 and a sense of doom hangs over Europe. Crops have failed, plague has visited the land, rumors of the impending End of Days are rife and Pope Urban has called for a crusade. The targets of the ensuing discontent are Europe's Jewish population. Defenseless and friendless, they face certain disaster.
Far to the north, in the Steppes of western Asia, dwell the Khazars, a tribe of Turkish nomads who had converted to Judaism some centuries before. Perceiving them to be European Jewry's only hope, the Jewish Grand Vizier of Muslim Spain, Hasdai ibn-Shaprut, recruits a brave young man, Yochanan of Strasbourg, for a desperate mission: to locate the Khazars and convince them to ride to their countrymen's rescue.
A Fire From the North is the story of Yochanan's adventures in search of the elusive Khazars and their epic battles against Seljuq Turks, western crusaders and armies of European knights to rescue the European Jews from exile and return them to a free Land of Israel. It's a well-researched novel of swashbuckling adventures that brings the Middle Ages to life.
For More Info, visit: www.StephenWeissBooks.com
About Stephen Weiss
Stephen Weiss was born in New York in 1943. From an early age he was imbued with a love of history, languages and a curiosity about what was “out there”. At the age of seventeen this led him to leave high school early to work as a merchant marine sailor, an adventure which took him to England, Denmark, Portugal, France and Morocco.
Joining the Air Force after college, Stephen was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California for an intensive year-long course in Polish and then a two-year tour as a Russian and Polish language intelligence expert in Germany, followed by an assignment to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland.
After some traveling, which included almost a year’s agricultural work on Kibbutz Hulda in Israel, during which Stephen became moderately fluent in Hebrew, he began a 36-year career with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Retirement has given Stephen the time to pursue his interests in writing, videography and computer animation. He lives in Bellevue, Tennessee with his wife, Judith Weiss, Ph D. They have two married children and six grandchildren.