Excerpt from Swimming Across by Andrew S. Grove, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Religious identity played no part in my world then. Some of our visitors were Jews, others were not. Those who were not Jewish seemed no different from us. While many Jewish people had German names, like Fleischer, Schwartz, or Klein, our name was no different from non-Jewish names. The word grof is Hungarian for "count." Family legend has it that an ancestor was the estate manager for a Hungarian count and somehow people started to refer to him by association as "the Count." In more recent times, some Jews changed their names to Hungarian-sounding surnames. Our family already had one.

I was born Andras Grof, but everyone called me by the more familiar form, Andris.

Copyright © 2001 by Andrew S. Grove