“All my life I wanted to write a book, but life didn’t let me,” said Brooklyn-born businessman Harry Freund, 65, sitting in his Rockefeller Center office. He finally decided to write about a certain segment of the Upper East Side: “the world I live in: affluent, Jewish Manhattan, which – like most worlds – is interesting, crazy and colorful.” His novel “Love With Noodles: An Amorous Widower’s Tale” (Carroll & Graf), describes a 60 year-old wealthy Jewish widower, Dan Gelder, and his romantic escapades in beginning to date again. Mr. Freund pulled out a long yellow pad, the kind on which his secretary, Sonia Sorg, had “deciphered and typed” his scribbling. “I hope the book is funny but also filled with Jewish wisdom.”

The book casts a satirical but unreservedly affectionate eye on Jewish society: There’s a hilarious wedding-planning meeting where the expectations of two families clash. Elsewhere in the book, there’s a line for the “chopped liver sculpture” at a charity gala; upon leaving that event, Gelder and his date begin “the lengthy social process of ‘the Jewish good-bye’ which can take thirty minutes.”

Initially, the author set out to explore the question of how an assimilated Jew with a nostalgic connection to Judaism would respond to the intermarriage of his only child. (Gelder walks out of a restaurant speechless when he learns his son, Eric, is marrying a Methodist.) While intermarriage was the author’s initial intent, “the personality of my protagonist took over. I don’t know how to say this, but his romantic life became the center of the book. It took on a life of its own.”

Have his friends recognized themselves in his fiction? Mr. Freund said a widower in his circle of friends who has not yet remarried called to tell him he couldn’t believe how accurately the author had described his state of mind. But there are downsides to writing fiction: “I was at a dinner party, and a lady took me aside and was very angry.” She said she was upset at the way he depicted her in the book: “But I hadn’t even thought of her” in fashioning the characters, which are composites and amalgams, he said.

Mr. Freund has been happily married for 40 years, so why should the protagonist be a widower? “I couldn’t write authoritatively about divorce.” If the wife in the novel were alive, then the protagonist, in dating these women, would be cheating on her. His wife, Mr. Freund said, wouldn’t like that, so better to have the protagonist a widower.

The inspiration for the novel came from an experience he had years ago in Sde Boker in the north of the Negev years ago. While accompanying David Ben-Gurion to the foot of Paula Ben-Gurion’s grave, the former Israeli prime minister turned to him and said, “A woman shouldn’t die before her husband – it isn’t fair to either of them.” This tender moment, in which the founder of the state of Israel encapsulated a bittersweet observation about life, stuck in Mr. Freund’s head and eventually became the inspiration for his protagonist.

The book’s title refers to a phrase Mr. Freud’s father told him – “love is good, but love with noodles is better.” Noodles refer here to a reason to get married other than just love. It could be companionship, money, sharing certain professional or other interests – something other than pure emotion.

Similarly, Mr. Freund feels religion needs something more than belief to survive, namely rituals and action. Asked about intermarriage today, he said it was a demographic crisis: “It so disturbs me after our glorious history that we might end just tip-toeing away.” Mr. Freund said if parents don’t actualize Judaism in their lives on a regular basis, their children are not likely to share an interest. “If it doesn’t penetrate your behavior, how can your kids pick it up?”

Mr. Freund has passed an interest in Judaism to his children: His daughter Rebecca works with a program that brings students to visit Israel; his son Michael founded a nonprofit helping marranos in Spain and Portugal, the Bnei Menashe in India, and anyone with Jewish roots or ancestry who wants to return to the Jewish people. Mr. Freund’s family has been closely intertwined with Judaism and philanthropy. His mother, a former national president of hadassah, commissioned Marc Chagall to create the famous Jerusalem windows for Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem.

Writing appears to run in the family. His mother wrote a book on Jewish merchants in Colonial America; his youngest son John is a scriptwriter; his daughter Rebecca used to edit a woman’s magazine; and his son Michael used to be a speechwriter for two former Israeli ambassadors to the United Nations.

He recalled Publishers Weekly likening his writing to the male version of Judith Krantz; he remembered Carolyn Starman Hessel, director of the Jewish Book Council, saying that those who read authors like Danielle Steel would see his work as a Jewish approach to that genre. He shrugged quizzically, “I had never read these authors.” Saying “Love With Noodles” was one of the funniest books he had ever read, his business partner, Jay Goldsmith, said, “He’s the most incongruous person to have written this: He doesn’t go to movies, he doesn’t read these kind of books. He’s intellectual.” Mr. Freund is drawn more to nonfiction, particularly Jewish, American, and European history, after having majored in economics at Wharton.

The sociological eye he brings to the book has been honed doing bankruptcy work – a negotiative process. Bankruptcy involves evaluating and considering personalities in a sometimes emotional setting.

He and Mr. Goldsmith founded Balfour Investors Incorporated 30 years ago, but had a rare argument over what to call the company. His partner wanted an English-sounding name while Mr. Freund wanted a Jewish sounding one. Commuting between Manhattan and Westchester, Mr. Freund happened to read a newspaper article quoting the late Rabbi Balfour Brickner of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. “Balfour,” Mr. Freund said, “it’s Jewish and it’s British!” By serendipity or fate, the New York Stock Exchange admitted the company on November 2, the date of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Their company buys distressed securities of companies in or near bankruptcy with the aim of making money when the company recovers.

Mr. Freund said most publishing houses are looking for first-time authors who are about 25 to 30 years old and have a dozen books ahead of them. Asked who is the audience is, he said, “I am told women 40 or older, certainly Jewish readers and hopefully others,” adding that if one writes something authentically, it rises above the narrow bounds of ethnicity.

He is pondering writing a sequel, set four years later, after the protagonist is married to one of these ladies. If it becomes a television series or movie (with five great roles for actresses of a certain age), author Stephen Fried’s book blurb wittily conjures a possible title a la Candace Bushnell: “Sex in the Sixty.”

gshapiro@nysun.com