Why a corporate lawyer walked away to write

Long before he was a corporate lawyer, and long before he was an author, Daniel Jaffee was a boy in suburban New Jersey, slipping down to the basement to plunk out short stories on his mother’s old manual typewriter. 

Now 70, Jaffee has written a memoir, Russian Silhouette. It draws on seven trips to the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia between the 1970s and the 1990s, and it is as much about the people he met there as it is about the way they helped him understand himself.

For Jaffee, writing began as a hobby. His parents had lived through the Great Depression, and he recognised the importance of a solid career with a steady income. Law was the option they suggested.

“I couldn’t have told you what it was lawyers did day-to-day, but I was gearing up to become one, nonetheless,” he recalled. So, he went to Harvard Law School. 

Russian came into the picture through that same practical thinking. In the mid-1970s, with a career in international law in mind, he figured the Soviet Union was one of two countries worth watching. He had studied French in high school and had family history of emigration from the former Russian Empire, so at Princeton University he switched to Russian. After Harvard Law School, he became a corporate lawyer. But he didn’t enjoy it.