Jacob Thomson Official Website

Jacob Thomson was born in New York in 1923. The last of nine children, his parents had fled Tsarist Russia in 1907 in response to the government policy supporting the persecution of Russian Jews. His parents were among the "fortunate" third under this policy, which held that the "Jewish problem" could be solved by the emigration of a third, conversion of another third to the Russian Orthodox faith, and killing the final third.

"Despite being in New York, it was a little like Fiddler on the Roof," Thomson revealed. "I was the last child because the first eight were girls and, being good Orthodox Jews, my parents were going to keep trying until they had at least one child of each sex. It's a tradition. Some get lucky and manage with only two kids. Mama and Papa took a little longer."

In that less enlighted age, Thomson received special privileges from his status as the only male child. While his sisters attended the public schools in the Jewish section of New York's Lower East Side, Thomson was sent to a small Yeshiva two blocks from his parents' crowded apartment. He remained at the Yeshiva until December 1941, when he dropped out and enlisted in the Army Air Forces.

Initially applying for pilot training, Thomson discovered that he had a minor inner ear problem that prevented passing a pilot's physical. Still, his test scores qualified him for Officer's Candidate School, and he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1942. Sent to Page Field at Fort Myers, Florida after commissioning, he was trained as a bombardier and assigned to a B-17 squadron in the United Kingdom.

"What I remember most about that," he said, "is that I lived through it. A lot of us didn't. We lost four from my own plane before we finished our 25 missions and got rotated back to the States." Besides surviving, he also found a wife. Married in London in 1943, Thomson and his bride, the daughter of a London shoichet (kosher slaughterman), produced four children, two boys and two girls. His wife passed away in 1991.

Returning to the Yeshiva after the war, Thomson was ordained in 1949. At the same time, he pursued a degree at Columbia University. It was a somewhat unusual program, for the Yeshiva generally frowned on secular education. Still, he continued at the university after his ordination, ultimately earning a PhD in English Literature in 1954. While he was doing this, he was also starting to raise a family and had taken on the responsibility of a small congregation in Brooklyn.

During 39 years in the active rabbinate, Thomson served six congregations in four states, the last 18 years in the same congregation on the east coast of Florida. Despite an Orthodox upbringing and education, all but the first congregation was Conservative.

Thomson did quite a lot of writing during this period, under his real name, with a number of articles published, mostly in professional journals. He also contributed regular book reviews to the local newspaper. But it wasn't until after his retirement that he started seriously considering writing fiction.

Thomson had always had an interest in the horror genre, particularly the classic novels of the 18th Century. He was also an avid reader of detective fiction. In the late 1990s, having moved to a retirement community on Florida's Gulf Coast, he combined these two interests and his traditional education and profession to produce his first novel, The Alukam, originally published by Writer's Club Press in 2001 and republished by Riverdale Electronic Books in 2004.

In addition to The Alukam, Thomson also wrote the introduction to Riverdale's 2002 Microsoft Reader edition of Dracula. He has also written a number of so-far unpublished short stories in the horror genre, some of which will appear on this site.