Alvin - Story of a Life: The autobiography of Alvin J. Ziontz

“ALVIN” is the story of a life - a career as a lawyer defending Indian tribes and a parallel career in photography. The writer, 87, tells stories; stories of a young man from a middle class Jewish family in Chicago, a voracious reader with a talent for art and music, yet seeking out the work of a manual laborer, a story of racial bigotry in the U.S. Army, the story of his rise from a mediocre law student to the founder of a law firm in Seattle that became a national leader in the defense of tribal sovereignty, the story of the love of “Lennie”, the girl he married and her conquest of cancer, the story of his children and their lives, and the story of his immersion in the art of photography. The stories include devoting his lawyer’s skills to exonerate a mailman wrongly accused of stealing from the mails, arguing a case in the Supreme Court, persuading a court that his client’s possession of gold bullion was not a crime, debating an “Equal Protection” issue with the future Justice of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, meeting John F. Kennedy, litigating a Rabbi’s will by crossing swords with the highest authority in Orthodox Judaism and his part in the struggle of American Indian tribes to reconstruct their tribal governments.