Writer and lawyer Victor Pollak has traveled frequently in Europe, including France, where he became fascinated learning about preservation of cultural monuments, accomplished so successfully by the French. He has also visited the Middle East, Mexico and South America. Saving the Light at Chartres is his first book. He divides his time between Tucson and Washington state.
Pollak was born in Evanston, Illinois to a father who had emigrated from Austria in 1938 and a mother who had grown up in Detroit as one of seven daughters of Hungarian immigrants. As a boy in the 1950s, Pollak lived for a year in Vienna with his parents, brother and sister, and attended public school. He grew up in Evanston and earned a B.A. in philosophy and communications at Antioch College. While in college, he worked in radio, a sound recording studio in Philadelphia, film production, teaching in an outdoor school in New Hampshire, as a junior executive in the toy department of Macy's flagship store in New York City, and as a junior instructor for two summers in month-long wilderness expeditions of the Colorado Outward Bound School. After a year in publishing, he entered Loyola University of Chicago School of Law, from which he graduated with honors. He went on to serve as a law clerk to a Federal Court of Appeals judge and began his more than thirty years of law practice as a partner with law firms in Chicago and Salt Lake City. He is Of Counsel with the Salt Lake City law firm of Fabian VanCott. While in Chicago, he served for several years as co-chair of an international practice group that opened American law offices in countries in Eastern Europe, including in Warsaw in 1990 and Prague in 1991. After moving his family to Salt Lake City, he served as co-founder, CEO and general counsel to a biomedical R&D start-up company. As a lawyer, he has served clients in diverse businesses and earned recognition from professional peers and rating firms. In 2019, he earned his MFA in Writing from Pacific University.