A recovering Catholic and fifth-generation native of Durango, Colo., author, screenwriter, playwright and former journalist Tim Turner, who lives in Los Angeles, is the founder and tsar of Bessarabian Publishing.The Reluctant Conductor, which he co-wrote with Moisey Gorbaty, is the first in a tetralogy of historical novels loosely based on the family and life of Moisey, whom he met at the gym in Hollywood in 2010.At the time, there were some 500,000 Russian speaking people in Los Angeles and Tim heard the language regularly at the gym. A language nerd-he's fluent in Spanish and French and has studied German, Italian and Czech-he was listening to Russian Berlitz tapes when Moisey sat down next to him in the locker room and Tim took off his headphones and said, "Доброе утро," which means "Good morning."Moisey's jaw dropped because in the 21 years he'd been in Los Angeles, no American had EVER attempted to speak Russian to him. "I'll teach you to speak Russian," said Moisey, who is Jewish and a graduate of the Moldovan Conservatory of Music, then added: "What do you do?""I'm a writer," Tim said."You should write my life story," Moisey said.Tim rolled his eyes and said: "Do you know how many times I've heard that?"After two years of studying Russian together, the two agreed that there was at least one book about Moisey living through the era of the USSR and then immigrating to the USA. They signed a collaborators agreement, started videotaping interviews of Moisey telling his family stories, and traveled together with Moisey's wife to Moldova and another trip to Rome to research Part 3.Tim has traveled extensively all over the world, including a trip to Moscow, Saint Petersburg and a cruise on the Baltic Sea. After a decade, multiple drafts, and now able to speak, read, write and touch type in Russian, Tim published The Reluctant Conductor on Nov. 9, 2023.
