My father loved "Fiddler on the Roof." He used to play the tape over and over, remembering the Polish-Ukrainian village he had come from. But he always laughed at the dance numbers. "Singing, yes," he said. "People did sing. But how could you dance in mud?"

-- Opening lines from "Streets of Mud, Streets of Gold"

Fruma Klass says she is a freelance copy editor for the income and a writer of fiction "for God." The Mt. Lebanon writer has had short stories published, for pennies-per-word, in little-known literary magazines and anthologies. She has written for technical journals and trade publications and has written copy for catalogs.

		Read the essay Fruma Klass's entire essay can be found on the Web site www.powerofpurpose.org, along with the other winning entries. Further information about the John Templeton Foundation can be found at www.templeton.org.

But to her great surprise and delight, her biggest cash payoff came from an essay celebrating the courage and determination of her grandfather and other relatives who left the streets of mud in Eastern Europe, a century ago, to find the streets of gold in America.

Her essay won $25,000 from the Power of Purpose Awards, a worldwide essay competition sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. More than 7,000 entries were submitted from 97 countries. A total of $500,000 was handed out to 19 writers. The grand prize was $100,000. There were four awards of $50,000, four awards of $25,000 and 10 awards of $10,000.

The foundation's mission is to promote the exploration of our spiritual nature, with emphasis on examining creativity, gratitude and altruism.

It was the first time she had entered the contest and Klass was stunned when she got the telephone call telling her that she had won. She doesn't even recall exactly how she found out about the contest.

"I saw a notice somewhere and clipped it out," she said.

It took her a couple of weeks to write the essay, which fills a little more than six standard 8 1/2-by-11-inch pages, double spaced. Most of that time was spent doing research, some of it on the Ellis Island Web site, in between her freelance jobs.

"When I am in the middle of a copy editing job, I don't write," she said.

Fruma Klass, 69, grew up in New York City and graduated from The Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn College. She worked as a lab technician and then did medical editing for a major publishing house.

She married Phil Klass in 1957 and they spent much of their marriage in State College, where he taught English and comparative literature at Penn State for 24 years. Fruma Klass was a writing instructor there for seven years and a copy editor for The Penn State Press. After her husband retired, they moved to Mt. Lebanon in 1988.

"When Phil retired he told me it was my turn to find a job," Fruma Klass said with a chuckle. "One of his former students was working at Black Box Corp." in Lawrence, Pa., and he suggested that his professor's wife should apply for the job editing the catalog for the company, which provides products, services and tech support for data and voice networks. She worked there for eight years.

They moved to Mt. Lebanon because they were looking for good schools for their daughter, Adina, then 12.

Meanwhile, 1988 was a noteworthy year in another way. It was the year that her first short story, "Before the Rainbow," was published in the anthology "Synergy 3."

"I used to say that one writer in the family was enough," Fruma Klass said. "But, Phil told me that if there was something I wanted to write, I should write it."

Phil Klass, 84, had been writing since 1945. In 1957 he started writing science-fiction under the pen name of William Tenn. He has written 11 books, dozens of short stories, academic articles and essays.

Fruma Klass's second story, "After the Rainbow" won a Writers of the Future second-place prize in 1996. She won $750 for that and an all-expenses paid trip to the 12th annual Hubbard Achievement Awards in Houston. The contest was created by L. Ron Hubbard, writer and founder of the Church of Scientology, to discover beginning writers of science-fiction and fantasy. Her prize-winning story was published in "Writers of the Future Vol. XII" anthology.

Her most recent story, "Two More for Tolstoi" was published last month in the "Synergy 5" anthology, along with an entry from her husband.

Fruma Klass is working on her first novel, science-fiction set in Israel circa 1980.

Their daughter, Adina, 27, lives in Wilkes-Barre, where she works in technical customer service. Phil and Fruma Klass live quiet lives with their cats, Mazzie and Malka, amid neighbors who generally don't know about their publishing accomplishments.

Klass, writing as William Tenn, has been awarded a number of honors in the science-fiction community, including being named Author Emeritus in 1999 by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America at the Nebula Awards Banquet in Pittsburgh.

The couple is also involved in a loosely-organized group called Pittsburgh Area Real Time Science Fiction Enthusiasts Consortium, "where Phil is an elder statesmen," Fruma Klass said.

While Phil and Furma Klass usually write science-fiction, her $25,000 winning essay is nonfiction set in the past. A press release from The Power of Purpose Awards describes her work: "The place: a 'Fiddler-on-the-Roof' kind of town, but in its squalid, starving reality. The family: intent on coming to America, with no money, no resources outside themselves and only an overwhelming sense of purpose to direct them."

Klass's family is Jewish, and her essay makes much of the fact that the family yearned for America not just for the potential for good jobs and incomes. What they were really seeking was "freedom from fear. ... to be free of the all-pervading fear brought by the police or the army. ... to be free, finally, of the ever-present terror of the pogrom" against Jews.

Fruma Klass's essay notes that in the course of a century, one old man and his six children grew to 31 Americans in the first generation and more than a hundred in the second generation. The children of immigrants became doctors, lawyers and teachers. Their ranks include a theoretical mathematician, a commercial artist, some sociologists, an accountant, a librarian, musicians, mail carriers, salesmen, a few rabbis and now an award-winning writer.

Fruma Klass immortalizes them all in the essay, which ends this way: "At the end of 'Fiddler on the Roof,' when the people are forced to leave their little town of Anatevka, my father always got a little angry. 'What's the matter with these people?' he would demand. 'Why are they sad?' Then he would cry out to the characters in the movie: 'You shouldn't be sad, you should be joyful! Don't you know you are going to the land of freedom, the land of justice? You are going to America, to golden America!' "