Alex Bloch grew up in Germany. Prior to World War II, his family left for the United States in 1936. He was educated in America and graduated from MIT and from Columbia University with a master’s in industrial engineering. The author moved to Israel in 1968, where he was an engineer. Just before retirement, he went back to school to study history, an old favorite, and received a Ph.D. in this subject, and then taught for some years. He was inspired to write this novel because “it shows the change from a liberal democracy to a dictatorship.”