Alexander Troy
I was a bookish child, which is no surprise considering our small house was crammed with books. My father was a professor of economics at Rutgers, and my mother worked in its library system. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli quipped he was born in a library because of all the volumes in his childhood home. I could say the same.
The quality of nerdiness often goes hand in hand with being a young reader, and I was no exception. A childhood neighbor, the son of a Holocaust survivor, was once my closest friend. Our idea of a cool time was for him to come over to my house and we’d sit side by side, reading to ourselves. As I got interested in sports we drifted apart, but I am still grateful to him for lending me The Phantom Tollbooth.
Like many avid readers, at some point I started dreaming of writing a book. I did not have a topic in mind, though I am sure if a time traveler had told me my first published book would be about a Jewish boarding school I would have cringed or wept. (That would have been my reaction because like most people who went to Hebrew School in the sixties and seventies, my memories of the experience were overwhelmingly negative.) Looking back, I think that my dream of writing a book came about from an argument that went something like this: if reading is such a pleasurable and important activity, then surely producing the content to be read was even more significant.
This desire intensified as I readied for college, but it was at that point that I had what in retrospect was a life-altering conversation that put me on a path that led far from books and writing for a time and then, amazingly to the school that would inspire The Academy Of Smoke And Mirrors.
That conversation was with my father. It was about what I was going to study at Yale. I remember sitting in the back yard on a hot summer day not long after my high school graduation when a letter came inviting me to apply for a freshman program called Directed Studies. Directed Studies, known to Yalies as “DS,” or to those with darker imaginations as “Directed Suicide,” was an intensive great books program. I was fired with excitement to apply, but Dad directed me away from DS. “We are a middle class family,” he said, “and you are going to have make a living. There will be loans to pay down when you graduate. Take economics.”
I dutifully followed his advice and quickly learned why economics is called “the dismal science.” Most nights of freshman year I planted myself in the school’s underground library and took a forced march up and down the peaks and troughs of demand and supply curves. I soon learned that there wasn’t much action in econ, but what little there was happened “at the margin.” (I’m still not totally sure what that means.) When it got late enough to feel I had done my duty, I turned with eagerness to the fiction and history readings from my other courses. Those were the books that gave me pleasure.
College was a formative time. I met my wife there, and I had an extraordinary professor who taught me to think. His name was Donald Kagan, and long after most of the lectures I heard there have faded, his remain vivid and powerful. I also learned that I had a knack for teaching. I learned this during exam week, when I would often prepare for a test by teaching friends who were also taking the course. It wasn’t that I was the smartest—far from it. But I had a knack for communicating ideas and seeing how they fit together. I enjoyed leading those review sessions and began to imagine myself becoming, at some point, a teacher and writer.
And I did, though that point was decades away from realization because between it and me was my father’s injunction to make money.
I went to law school immediately after college (a mistake), reasoning that my communication skills would be put to their best use in law. (By best use I mean I could sell them for the highest price.)
Once I entered the working world, I began to appreciate my father’s advice. I started my career as a lawyer at a large New York firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions. It was a heady time, a time of deal-making, of surging stock prices, and of huge fortunes being made speculating on those deals. Because of my legal and economics training, I was able to jump into the swift moving current of those times, the eighties, and get carried along towards prosperity.
In fact, though I never saw myself as a stock market speculator, I soon came to the conclusion that betting on deals would be a lot better way to make a living than drafting the agreements that made them binding.
And so I joined the hedge fund world. I quickly got my first and second lessons on the importance of market timing: Lesson 1 was never join an investment desk dedicated to a strategy (“risk arbitrage” or investing in takeovers, in my case) that is about to collapse. That’s what happened to me: a year after joining a firm which famously claimed to “make money the old fashioned way” I was fired because risk arbitrage had gone out of style.
Lesson 2 was more pleasant: try to join an investment strategy before the whole world recognizes it is the next big thing and piles in.
So I joined a hedge fund, a small one, led by a dynamic entrepreneur who aspired to live like a nineteenth century plutocrat. When I joined, I didn’t have any idea that the hedge fund business was poised to take off like a rocket ship, and neither did he. The small band he put together, of which I was one, rode the booming equities market of the nineties, while trying to avoid the frauds, crazes, and panics that would occasionally shake the markets and topple some of our peers.
The world I had entered was far from that quiet underground library where I had slogged through economics problem sets. I sat on a large trading floor, where phones rang constantly, traders were shouting out the purchases and sales they had just executed, and large screen TV’s brought us the news. We read SEC filings and built models, huddled and talked, made calls to probe for details, and then bought and sold, bought and sold. It was especially exciting when a company would ask for its stock to be halted and announce it was being bought in a deal. Our team would huddle and work out what the deal was worth, how risky the deal was, and what the stock would be worth should the deal fail. Based on these factors and some other considerations, we would calculate the price we would be willing to pay and then see where the stock would trade when it opened. In those moments I thought again, with gratitude, of my father’s guidance. For all those calculations and estimates and modeling were, in the end, attempts to estimate the demand and supply curves for the stock in question.
When the 2000’s arrived I had left the fund and started my own. After a fast start my fund faltered. Eventually I closed it. That setback gave me the time to reflect. I became very interested in Judaism. As I said, my childhood memories of Hebrew school were negative, but the sourness those memories imparted had faded. I began to study and learn and also observe certain mitzvot, or rules, and I found these activities gave me pleasure and helped me to understand myself better. I couldn’t know it at the time, but by embracing Judaism I taken a step close to writing a book, a dream that, however far I had gotten from, I hadn’t surrendered.
My last Wall Street job was running the private investment office for a very successful family. I had known this family for almost two decades when I took the job. I respected them deeply. At the time I took the role they were becoming controversial because of their primary business, a pharmaceutical company. But I didn’t consider this development significant, which was not true. I enjoyed the job very much and would have stayed indefinitely, but I was maneuvered out as a result of office politics. This was painful and disappointing, but looking back I see that it was as if a providential push had nudged me out of an environment that was about to become ground zero of a national crisis and towards my vision of a life of teaching and writing.
After leaving the family investment office, I enrolled in the master’s degree program Saint John’s College of Annapolis. There I read the great books that I would have read as a freshman in Yale’s Directed Studies program, but now I was a man in my mid-fifties and able to bring a lifetime of experience and reading to these works. This too seemed in its way consistent with my father’s advice given on that long ago summer afternoon. I was reading these books now with adequate preparation because I had done what he said I needed to do.
On graduating from St. John’s, I learned about a Jewish boarding school in Greensboro, North Carolina that was looking for a Head of School. It was the only school of its kind in the world, and a friend from my investment days arranged for me to interview. I was interested in teaching, not being an administrator, but in the end I was able to take on both roles.
Shortly after starting the job, I realized that the school had a unique personality, as vivid and striking as any literary character I had encountered. By habit I keep a journal, but I added a second school-specific journal to record the many adventures and events that defined this endearingly eccentric place. I felt that that providential hand was now offering a gift which mustn’t be spurned. Just as Arthur Conan Doyle had found in his medical professor Joseph Bell, the model for Sherlock Holmes, so I had been given leadership over an institution from which a striking and memorable character could be conjured. And to see for yourself that this is so, please buy, and read, a copy of The Academy of Smoke And Mirrors: A Boarding School On The Brink.