Robert Katzman emerges from a cave of plastic-clad magazines and posters, stacked on shelves, hanging from walls, a megalopolis of magazines as far as the eye can see. This is Katzman's Morton Grove store, Magazine Memories.

But Katzman - 59 years old, bearded, wearing a large gold Star of David around his neck - doesn't want to talk about the store.

"We're here to talk about the writing, right?" he says. The writing: four provocative self-published books about his life, adventures, friends, with two in the works and four more planned for the future. This is what he wants to talk about, but since the books are about his life, it's impossible to discuss one without the other. So the words tumble out of Katzman, a stream-of-consciousness torrent of words about books, about newsstands, delis, about cancer, about Judaism, Chicago, the Mafia, cops, friends, enemies, businesses launched and collapsed, big failures and little hurts and humiliations and small triumphs. Katzman is eager to talk about them all, write about them all.

One theme emerges, and it's also the name of the publishing company he started and the overall title of all his books: "Fighting Words." It's his philosophy of life.

"I'm very defiant," he admits. "My whole attitude is to not accept what life throws at you without complaint. You should stand up for yourself, believe that you have value and not leave it up to someone else to make that determination."

Life has thrown a lot at Katzman, including 30 operations starting from when he was 18. In 2004, he had two brain surgeries, and it was then, concerned that he would lose his memory, that he decided to publish the stories he has been writing since 1958. He says his memory has been compromised, but he rattles off dates of events in his life - to the day - without hesitation. And in his store, which contains 40,000 posters, he says if someone asks him for a certain one, he will know "within a second" if he has it.

But to begin at the beginning.

"I came from a very violent home, a crazy place," he says. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, with immigrant parents who spoke mostly Yiddish, although he doesn't speak it himself. He went to Hebrew school, where his teachers, like his parents, screamed a lot. He had a bar mitzvah, but his Jewish identity didn't "take" until much later.

In eighth grade he applied to and was accepted at the University of Chicago High School. "But my father had left home a year earlier, and I couldn't go to that school unless I paid for it," he says. "And in 1964, I couldn't get a job where I could make enough to pay the tuition, so at the end of my freshman year, I opened a newsstand, thinking, well, I'll stay for one summer. I stayed 20 years." He had already left home by this time, living who knows where.

Newsstands figure prominently in Katzman's life and in his books, even in the titles of those books. The first, which he calls "Fighting Words 1," is "Chicago Bob's Newsstand 1965-1985." In the second, "Escaping and Embracing the Cops of Chicago," the title story refers to an incident in which his newsstand burned down.

The third is "Saul Bellow, Kosher Pickles and the Aluminum Fortress" - the fortress is a newsstand Katzman fireproofed with aluminum siding. The fourth and latest is "Hot Sex! and Small Change: The Seduction of a Shy Teenager in his Wooden Newsstand" - no explanation needed. (For more on the books visit Fighting WordsPubCo.com. Katzman also has a blog, DifferentSlants.com.)

His first newsstand was at 51st Street and Lake Park on the South Side. Eventually he owned five more, including one at Randolph and Michigan, right by the old Chicago Public Library, a central intersection where the stand drew everyone from politicians to ordinary people. At one time, the city of Chicago tried to shut it down, claiming Katzman didn't have a permit. ("There hadn't been a permit for that newsstand for 100 years," he says.) It was saved by the Mafia in a convoluted story that forms a chapter in one of the books.

Another chapter concerns the "aluminum fortress." In 1970, a vagrant threw a cigarette butt on a pile of newspapers at one of Katzman's stands and almost burned it to the ground. He pleaded with a policeman and a fireman, who were about to destroy it as a fire hazard, to let him try to rebuild and fireproof the stand, and they gave him two days to do it. With an eight-foot-tall roll of aluminum salvaged from a junkyard, he did; 39 years later, the stand is still there.

He draws many lessons from the incident. "When you run a newsstand you end up being a part of a certain strata of society - street people," he says, explaining that he doesn't mean the homeless but "firemen, cops, criminals, people who plow during blizzards, people who work physical jobs, work long hours, you're hot in summer, cold in winter." His story is about those people and about community. It's also about "the irony of life. Those two men making a decision, they're probably both dead. But the newsstand still exists. Why is it still there?"

Katzman has been moved to ask the same question about himself. When he was 18 and a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he was diagnosed with salivary gland cancer on the left side of his face. It was the same kind of cancer that has robbed film critic Roger Ebert of his voice. In what he calls an "eerie coincidence," Katzman had taken a class in film criticism from Ebert.

After the cancer, he survived five reconstructive surgeries on his face. First doctors used titanium, then replaced it with part of a bone from his hip. That didn't work, so 12 years later, they transplanted part of his rib into his face. It was designed to be a cosmetic procedure but instead paralyzed part of his face. He began to feel like "no matter what you do, you're not going to win."

"Now it's 27 years later, and the bone stayed put," he says. "I don't have much of a smile, and the right side is getting older than the left side, but it's OK because I'm not dead. I found out that most of the people who had what I had are dead. My attitude is, thank G-d I'm here, but it's also the impetus for my writing. I'm writing as fast as I can." A slight swelling on one side of Katzman's face is barely noticeable; he looks like a normal guy with a slightly lopsided grin, nothing pathological.

His latest surgery, on his left hand, took place last Sept. 30 - his 30th operation. "There's a certain synchronicity to that," he says. That day was Rosh Hashanah, and he had agreed to be an usher at services at his synagogue, Congregation B'nai Torah in Highland Park.

"I had the surgery at 8:30 in the morning and by noon I was at the synagogue wearing a sling, being an usher, and the people said, why are you here? I said, why shouldn't I be here? To me the whole point of life is you don't let every little thing beat you down and prevent you from accomplishing what you want, from meeting your commitments. Otherwise you go through life like, I'm a victim, oh poor me, everything happens to me. And I do not have that attitude. I suppose I could, but then where are you? Wallowing in misery, and that's a waste of time."

It's a philosophy of life that he returns to over and over.

That life has encompassed more than newsstands. When Katzman was 19, about five months after his cancer surgery, he opened a kosher delicatessen in Hyde Park.

"I had no experience. I had never worked in a deli," he says. "I just decided to do it. People said, you don't know anything about this, you're gonna lose all your money. My response was, so? Having cancer at 18 changes your perspective on everything else."

He sold the deli later that same year - "it's a pretty complex story," he says. "People thought when I left the newsstand I was getting into a more legitimate business that had more respect, but it turned out I went the other way. I sold the deli and bought another newsstand. I didn't like handling food."

From both experiences, he learned that it is in people's nature to take the second item from the top on a shelf, whether it's a newspaper or a piece of nova lox. "What people didn't know was that periodically I would take the top piece and put it underneath," he says.

Another strand of the story involves Katzman's meeting Saul Bellow, years earlier. While working in a drugstore, he delivered a prescription to the Nobel Prize-winning author. "My life and his wove together for the next 13 years," he says.

"When you run a newsstand or deliver a prescription or you have a no-status kind of job, how people treat you tells you a lot about them," he observes. "If they treat you with respect, it tells you a lot about them." Bellow did. "He was a really nice person," Katzman says.

The famous author encouraged Katzman to open a literary bookstore, which he did in 1975, naming it Gulliver's Periodicals. Later he owned another focusing on travel, called The Grand Tour. Eventually chain stores put both shops out of business, along with many other independent bookstores.

"Every kind of thing I've ever done has become extinct - newsstands, bookstores, kosher delicatessens," Katzman muses. "I'm gradually feeling like Daniel Boone - 'There used to be stagecoaches and Indians riding around here.'" Even the South Side Jewish community he belonged to no longer exists, which leads him to the observation that "part of being Jewish is a sense of temporariness."

The one thing that remains strong in Katzman's life is his family. He met his wife, Joyce, whom he describes as "stunningly beautiful, a destroyer of men," in 1975 at a conference; they married three years later. There are four children: Lisa, 34, an occupational therapist; David, 30, a filmmaker; Rachel, 28, a singer and songwriter who is currently recording songs in Hebrew, which she speaks fluently; and 12-year-old Sarah.

Of Sarah, Katzman says: "Two days before Thanksgiving 12 yeas ago, there was a baby on my couch, six weeks old. The people who couldn't keep her dropped her off and said take her or leave her, so we kept her. Very Jewish-looking, with green eyes and blond hair," he jests. "Well, she's Jewish now."

A baby on the couch? Take her or leave her? Katzman declines to elaborate but promises he will tell the full story in a planned seventh book, which will come out after the planned fifth and sixth books, which will come out when he finds the money to publish them. He does say "I have a life with cancer and children who get dropped off. Some people have to go to China (to adopt a child), so to me there's a balance." The relationship between all the children "is close and loving," he says.

As it is between himself and his wife, who now has multiple sclerosis. "I am very much in love with my wife," he says. "She is a wonderful person, a great mother and my companion in everything. I tell her I love her every day so I don't forget."

Joyce Katzman calls her husband "a good guy, very honest, very hard-working. He's very different, very assertive, so it makes an interesting and sometimes difficult time. He's a good guy. He's the person everybody calls when they have a problem. Because he is who he is doesn't make him the easiest person to live with, but he's a good guy. I'd do it all over again - I think." She adds that her 90-year-old mother, who lives with them, "adores him" and that her husband "tries to take care of everybody."

That trait is part of Katzman's Jewish identity, which he considers essential. Despite the unpleasant Hebrew school experiences and bar mitzvah, "I figured out I was Jewish when I was 17, at 57th Street near the viaduct. It was like an epiphany. I was thinking that you pray for help when you're in trouble but otherwise you don't think about your (Jewish) identity. I decided I was Jewish and that I'd be consistent. Then I educated myself about Judaism, and it has become the deepest part of my identity," he says.

At his synagogue, he considers Rabbi Jonathan Magidovitch "like a muse"; Magidovitch encouraged him to write a Holocaust story about "the effects of the Holocaust on someone too young to know about it" and about some of Katzman's ancestors who were killed in pogroms in Europe. Then the rabbi asked him to read it to the congregation on Yom Hashoah, which he did, with difficulty. The stories about his family will make up his fifth book.

Also at B'nai Torah, Katzman struck up an extraordinary friendship with a much older man, Mike Hecht, a retired businessman, well-known figure in the Jewish community and the synagogue's shofar blower for 40 years. Hecht wrote a foreword to one of Katzman's books in which he likened his writing to "the great tradition of Chicago realism" and compared him to such authors as Studs Terkel, James T. Farrell, Meyer Levin, Richard Wright and Nelson Algren.

The two men remained close for seven years, with Katzman taking Hecht to Talmud classes every Sunday morning. Hecht died on May 11 of this year, a day after his 90th birthday.

It was Hecht, Katzman says, who gave him the title for what will turn out to be his sixth book, the Whitmanesque "I Seek the Praise of Ordinary Men." That book, he says, will be a collection of poetry and short essays, and the title refers to "who is my audience. I want ordinary people to like my stories. I don't write for kings and queens and captains of industry."

And the stories - rough-cut, replete with personal asides and observations and, occasionally, photos or homemade cartoony illustrations - do seem to resonate with many readers. Katzman has sold about 4,000 books total - not much from a major publisher's standpoint, but not bad for a self-published, self-promoted literary product and, as the author says, "a whole lot more than zero."

For a time, Barnes & Noble and Borders carried the books in some of their stores, but Borders, inexplicably, displayed the books in the sports section, B&N in Illinois travel. Neither sports nor travel figure largely into the stories, which mostly detail such daily adventures as having to change an unruly flat tire, or extraordinary ones, such as a private tour of the Playboy Mansion, along with Katzman's encounters with other colorful Chicagoans.

Nevertheless, Katzman says he's happy with his writing and with the decision he made to self-publish through his own company, bypassing the agony of finding an agent or a publisher and, even in a good economy, much less a poor one, facing a future of rejection letters.

"I think the stories and the life I've lived are worth recording, worth telling," he says on the matter. "If it's commercial, that's the public decision. Whether some editor decides I'm worth something-the hell with that. I don't want somebody else to decide if my stories are good or not. I don't care."

Each of the books consists of about 15 stories, and all are true, Katzman avers. "I don't write any fiction whatsoever and I don't change anything, so if I'm the jerk in the story, I remain the jerk in the (written) story," he says. "If I did something brave or heroic or whatever, fine, good, but in real life that isn't a daily occurrence. A lot of people identify with my stories because I'm an ordinary person who has been in extraordinary situations."

"I'm focusing on the books because it's what I want my future to be," he adds. "On my tax return, when they ask for my occupation, I say writer. I think it's up to me to choose what I am and I believe I've been a writer all life doing other things."

Katzman has also recently discovered another unexpected talent. He has begun giving readings from his books to groups such as Hadassah and Rotary, and every Tuesday night steps up to the mic at the Cafe at Lincoln and Foster streets in Chicago to read a story.

"Twice, places sold tickets" to the readings, he says. "I found out I liked doing it. I didn't know I was a storyteller."

But Katzman doesn't have as much time as he'd like for writing. Six days a week he is at Magazine Memories, the Morton Grove periodical and poster store he has owned for 20 years. It is one of only seven such stores left in the United States, he says, selling everything from past issues of Life and Look, Colliers and Mad, Playboy and Scientific American, plus 40,000 posters in 48 categories. There are also whole walls of periodicals in such categories as space travel, law, opera, painting, ballet, science, comics, and of course, a section on Judaism.

Many customers come in for a newspaper or magazine published on the date of a birthday or anniversary, and recently representatives of two Hollywood movies - one about John Dillinger, the other Amelia Earhart - visited to buy period posters.

The store grew out of a hobby that Katzman began when he was 13, after President John F. Kennedy was killed - collecting newspapers about famous people who had died. Then, after his travel bookstore went out of business, he had a surplus of travel posters and magazines. He rented a space in Morton Grove, borrowed $1,000 from an uncle for lumber, and built all the shelves himself, a skill he learned during his newsstand days.

The store, he says, is "an endangered species," but locals aren't going out of their way to save it. "People in Skokie and Morton Grove don't have a clue," he says. "The other day a guy who owns a museum in New York City called me. I had 47 magazines he needed. He knows I'm here. I send magazines all over the country and Europe, but locally it's like, so what?" If a Walgreen's or a McDonald's closed, he says, "go a mile and you'll find another one. If I close you'd have to go a thousand or two thousand miles in any direction." His wife handles some bookkeeping duties, but otherwise Katzman runs the store solo, without even the help of a computer.

Although he realizes that staying open 20 years represents a victory, he says, "part of me is galled that this place isn't prized more. It's an enormous investment of time and knowledge. I know what's inside these magazines. This is a really special thing and I wish people locally prized it." Then he almost-smiles. "I know, bitch, bitch, bitch."

He says it as a joke, because bitch-bitch-bitch is what he most emphatically doesn't believe in doing. Rather, as he admits, "my attitude is pugnacious, and that's consistent. I am not dead. I am here, I'm a witness, and I will tell my story until I cannot tell my story anymore."

Fighting words.