Writer's Block »

Born in Lodz, Poland, in 1932, into a wealthy Jewish family, Julian Padowicz was 7 years old and living in Warsaw when WW II began. With bombs falling on their heads, Julian and his socialite mother began a trek that took them into southern Poland, where they endured Soviet occupation before escaping, in dramatic fashion, over the snow-covered Carpathian Mountains, into neutral Hungary. These experiences, as well as subsequent ones on their way to the United States, have been recounted in a three-part memoir by Padowicz under the titles, Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939, published in 2006, A Ship in the Harbor, published in 2009, and Loves of Yulian, due for publication in 2011. Educated in America, Padowicz received a degree in English from Colgate University, and served five years in the Air Force as an intercept instructor and navigator, prior to a 35-year career as a documentary filmmaker. As president of BusinessFilm International, he has written and produced films on the role of newspapers in a democratic society, alcoholism, and the legitimacy of feelings, among other subjects, as well as scripting a series on the American way of life for the U.S. Information Agency. Retired in 1991, Padowicz has gone on to write books on photography, dealing with angry customers, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, in addition to his three-part “Mother and Me” memoir. In demand as a speaker about his Holocaust-related experiences, Padowicz speaks in libraries, synagogues, churches, and universities throughout the country. He was recently invited to do a book signing at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. With his wife, Donna Carter, Padowicz lives in Stamford, CT. He is an avid tennis player and is frequently seen on his daily runs along Hope Street, where he says he does his most creative thinking. He writes a blog entitled “Confessions of the Hope Street Stalker,” in which he talks about the thoughts he has and the people he meets along these runs. Padowicz has three daughters, two stepsons, seven grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.

WRITER'S BLOCK - A sensational new novel from the award-winning author and filmmaker Julian Padowicz

From his miserable childhood to his mediocre career as a college professor, fate had not been kind, or even terribly fair, to "Kip" Kippur. But Kip's luck changes when he inherits a house in a small coastal village in Massachusetts. He chucks his previous life and moves there to write the Great American Novel-a thinly disguised autobiography.

As Kip struggles to transmute a leaden life into golden fiction, he finds himself alone and rudderless in a strange community. He stumbles into a mysterious murder, an awkward romance, a married lady's hot-tub, an unusual proposal of marriage-and an invitation to sail to Florida, during storm season, in a sailboat of questionable seaworthiness, with an autocratic captain and a homicidal crew mate.

But Writer's Block is more than just the tale of a late-life crisis gone terribly awry. It's also an intriguing portrait of a small town and the complex people who inhabit it. It will keep you riveted all the way to its crashing conclusion.