The Prison You Build for Yourself: An Interview on The Weight of Silence
On freedom, guilt, and the courage to act.
There’s nothing more tragic than a man without purpose.
In this new interview about my debut novella, The Weight of Silence, I speak about what lies beneath the story, a man’s quiet war between comfort and decay.
We talk about the idea of passivity as a prison, how the main character, David, isn’t behind bars but trapped in his own inaction, his lack of direction, and the suffocating comfort of a life unlived. I share how much of this was drawn from my own experience: working in ordinary jobs, surrounded by people who’d stopped pursuing anything beyond survival.
I explain how the story was born in an unlikely place, the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, where I found myself missing London and began writing about a man trying to reclaim his life in that very city. We also explore the moral stakes of the novel, why I prefer writing about situations where the consequences are absolute: guilt, redemption, even prison or death. Only when the stakes are high, I believe, can you truly expose a moral truth.
Later in the conversation, I discuss my literary and philosophical influences, Camus, Dostoevsky, Ayn Rand, and why I believe art must be emotionally naked. As I say in the interview, “great art comes from being able to convey whatever you feel in a candid, vulnerable way.”
Finally, we touch on what’s next: my new poetic work that explores the Jewish experience in Europe after October 7th, written as a symphony, movements of poems that blend language, music, and memory.
Watch the full interview here:
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