My Russian Book

Over the years, my books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Japanese, German, Polish, Romanian, and Russian. Usually, the publisher that published a book in the original language takes care of selling foreign rights; the author is not typically involved in this process. In fact, I only first discovered that my books had been published in foreign languages when my wife called me at work to inform me that a box of funny-looking books with my name on them had just arrived at our house. For a year or two, I kept getting boxes of books that had been translated into various Asian languages. I am not certain, but I may be as popular in South Korea as Psy (of Gangnam Style fame).

Anyway, as much as I enjoy my Asian fame, I really wanted Active Value Investing (my first book) to be published in Russian. Before I tell you why, let me tell you why I wrote Active Value Investing.

There are three categories of reasons why anyone writes a book (or does anything that requires a significant time commitment). The first category includes all the reasons you give in public interviews. They usually sound selfless and altruistic. Who wants to buy book written by a selfish egoist?

The second type are the ones you tell your close friends or your spouse. These reasons are less altruistic and more selfish (nothing wrong with that).

But then there is the third category of reasons, the deeply personal ones. You may or may not even be aware of all of them on the conscious level, but they are sitting deep in your subconscious, driving your decision making.

So why did I write Active Value Investing?

When I did TV interviews I’d say something along the lines of, “I had an idea that I wanted to explore and share with other value investors,” or “I wanted to develop strategy for sideways markets,” or “I wanted to know what I’d have learned when I was done writing this book.” All these reasons were true, but they only scratched the surface of my true motivations.

I told my wife that sales from this book would not dethrone J.K. Rowling; after all, I was writing for a narrow niche of value investing geeks (seriously, that book had 75 charts and tables). But it could help my career. (And it did.) Then I’d say, wouldn’t it be great if in addition to being married to this awesome guy, you were married to an author, and they were both the same person? (Okay, I didn’t say that, but I could have.)

And then there are the deeply personal reasons. These are the reasons that kept me going when I hit painful walls in my writing, which it seemed like I kept hitting every other day for a year and a half. One of the main reasons inadvertently slipped out of my subconscious onto the Active Value Investing dedication page: “For my parents. My father, Naum, and in memory of my mother, Irine. Thank you for always believing in me.”

You will see this point made many times on these pages: My parents always unconditionally believed in me, even when I gave them no reason to do so. That belief gave me the fuel that kept me going through wall after painful wall. Writing this book was my way of repaying my father for all he had done for me.

I wanted to him to be proud of me. It was that simple.

I wanted Active Value Investing to be translated into Russian so my father could read it. He immigrated to the US when he was 58, and despite his significant efforts (he was still going to college in Denver to study English when he was 76), his control of English was limited. I put my soul into every word of my books, and I wanted to share this one with one of the most important people in my life.

I emailed my original manuscript to the largest publisher of foreign business books in Russia and asked them to publish it. They agreed but asked if I’d mind “editing” the book. They would translate it, but I’d have to make sure that the translation was accurate. They’d still publish it even if I said no to the task, but they wanted to take advantage of my Russian background. I agreed.

A few months later, I received a Word document of the Russian version of my manuscript. I started reading it and went into shock: I understood every word, but I couldn’t connect their meanings to make comprehensible sentences.

It wasn’t the translation – that was fine. It was me. My comprehension of business Russian was close to zero.

I left Russia when I was 18. I speak English to most of my friends. Even with my Russian friends, when the topic switches to business, we switch to English. All my business education was in English.

Back to “editing” the book. I didn’t know what to do – I had given my word that I would edit it. I asked my father, who has a PhD and taught electrical engineering at the Murmansk Marine Academy for almost 30 years, to help.

He knows little about investing, but he is very smart.

He grew up in a world where the government owned almost all private property. He had thought investing was a legalized form of gambling with other people’s money. He could not believe that I could actually have a career in this investing thing. For a long time he insisted that I go into a real business, something tangible, like opening a bagel store or a donut shop. He even offered to help.

My father and I took the translated manuscript on our trip to South Africa in 2009 and discussed it for two weeks. Long (12-hour) flights suddenly seemed much shorter. He would read it and question everything; we had long conversations about investing, sideways markets, and my exploitation of Shalom Aleichem’s characters (you have to read Active Value Investing or The Little Book of Sideways Markets to get that reference – sorry!).

After reading my book, he said he’d changed his mind about what I do for a living. While reading the book, he tried to relate investing to an exact science; and we had long debates about how investing is at the intersection of science, psychology, and art. As I look at this experience many years later, I realize that working on editing the Russian version of the book with my father was one of the highlights of my life.

After the editing work was done, I asked him if he would create a painting specifically for the book. I had borrowed another of his paintings for the cover of the English edition, but I wanted to be able to share something specifically created for the Russian version. Luckily for me, he agreed (you can see that painting among the other examples of my father’s paintings in the middle of this book).