Robert Friedman published his most recent book last fall. Before he wrote for the Beacon, he was a correspondent for The San Juan Star and New York Daily News. Photo by Maddy Friedman

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Former Beacon writer Robert Friedman, 92, has traveled the world, interviewed celebrities and published seven books.

His latest title, Wolf on the Trail, published last fall, revisits a familiar character from his previous novels, a detective and Auschwitz survivor.

Friedman started writing almost seven decades ago. In 1953, he was drafted into the U.S. Army in preparation to join the American forces in the Korean War. Luckily, the war ended shortly after he completed basic training.

After returning home, he used G.I. Bill funds to attend Ohio State University, where he graduated in three years with high honors and a Bachelor of Science in journalism.

“I wanted to write, and I didn’t want to write in a corner by myself,” Friedman said. “I wanted to be involved with people and the world. I wanted to know what was going on, and I wanted to write about it.”

He then traveled to Sweden to attend the English graduate school at the University of Stockholm, which attracts students from every English-speaking country in the world. There, he spent a year studying Swedish literature.

He briefly lived in Paris and then Greece, where he worked for a newspaper called The Athens, followed by a stint at the military publication Stars and Stripes while living in Germany.

Puerto Rico years

In the 1980s, Friedman landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he lived for almost 30 years. He worked as reporter, editor and columnist for The San Juan Star, interviewing the likes of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie and Muhammad Ali. But the locals interested him more than visiting celebrities.

“Their world was screwed up, with their relationship to the United States. They were struggling all the time to make ends meet. But there was something very sympathetic about them, and that’s why I stayed,” he said.

During his time in Puerto Rico, Friedman also worked as the Caribbean correspondent for the New York Daily News, writing a weekly Sunday column about the island.

He met his wife, Virginia, in Puerto Rico, and they raised two daughters there. When the girls approached their teenage years, the family decided to move back to the States.

“It was just time to move on,” Friedman said. “I wanted my daughters to see what the United States was like. Although Puerto Rico is part of the United States, the culture is different.”

He became the Washington, D.C. correspondent for The San Juan Star, leading to his move to Silver Spring, Maryland. Friedman then began writing profiles and theater reviews for the Beacon for more than a dozen years.

Life as a transplant

Last year Friedman moved to a retirement home near his daughter in Maplewood, New Jersey, less than an hour from his childhood home in the Bronx.

Friedman calls himself a “journalist turned novelist.” Initially, as a full-time journalist, he would work on his novels in the evenings. When The San Juan Star folded in 2008, Friedman began writing novels full-time.

“After a while, my novels became more important,” he said. “My novels became something that I loved writing.”

While he is a believer that authors “write what [they] know,” he says they also write about what they’ve read. Some of his favorite authors include Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, William Kennedy, Ralph Ellison, James Joyce and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Friedman’s published novels include The Odyssey of Pablo Camino, The Defining Sea and Ulysses in San Juan, which were published as The Puerto Rico Trilogy, as well as Caribbean Dreams, Under a Dark Sun, and Island Wildlife: Exiles, Expats and Exotic Others.

The Puerto Rico Trilogy features the character D.I. Wolf, a Polish-Jewish concentration camp survivor who has come to Puerto Rico to rebuild his life.

“Wolf is a conglomeration of several people I met — Jewish refugees who lived in Puerto Rico in the ‘70s and the ‘80s,” Friedman said.

Wolf reappears in Friedman’s newest novel, Wolf on the Trail, which follows Wolf’s quest to find the disappeared wife of a real estate mogul.

Friedman’s passion for Puerto Rico has led him to want to share his experiences there with readers and to bring attention to the island’s political situation. He notes that Puerto Rico, despite technically being a commonwealth, is “like a high-class colony of the United States, which would be the last thing [Puerto Ricans] would admit.”

When asked if he had plans for future novels, Friedman replied, “Well, I’d like to write one more book, and I think in my 92nd year, I’m almost capable,” he joked. “I’m almost ready to do it.”