See my Author Interviews online

There are currently two interviews of me online.  The first is at Christoph Fischer's site, a fellow author:
http://www.christophfischerbooks.com/alan-wynzel-when-i-was-german/

The second is at Paul Western-Pittard's site, another fellow author:
http://cerullean.net/author-interview-alan-wynzel/

A third interview of me is scheduled to be posted on Feb. 23rd at Danica Cornell's book site: http://www.danicacornell.com/index.html

My childhood memoir, When I Was German, is available free for kindle at Amazon, where as of this writing it's #1 in the category: Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Memoirs-Thank you READERS and Twitter Retweeters!
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM

Welcome to my writing blog, "Goodreaders" (and everyone else)

Welcome to my writing blog, and thanks for visiting.  I hope you will explore the numerous postings I've made over the past few months.  I've posted a number of excerpts from my childhood memoir When I Was German, a few short stories, and two excerpts from my completed novel, The Seventh Round, which I will publish sometime in 2014.

I also have a poetry blog for when the spirit moves me:  http://poemsfromelmstreet.blogspot.com

You may have noticed my writing blog is A Voice from Lake Valley Road and my poetry blog is Poems from Elm Street.  Why?  Because my writing blog is primarily concerned with my childhood memoir, which I spent most of on "Lake Valley Road".  My poetry is mostly about my current life, and today, I live on "Elm Street". 

When I Was German is available @ Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM

The Holocaust, revisited via 1976 Munich Olympics: Evil Unmasked

This all went down for real in my house when Munich hosted the 1976 Summer Olympics

When I Was German is available:
At Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
At Smashwords : https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Apple for iBooks, search on "wynzel"
See my book on Goodreads, too:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18659300-when-i-was-german
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel

            It was late summer and my mother was very excited.  I was very excited because she was: Munchen was having the summer Olympics!  The games hadn’t started but already Munchen was on TV every night.  Look, there’s the Olympiaturm, my mother cried and pointed.  Right there on the news!  Remember the Olympiaturm?  Now it’s open and people can go up to the restaurant and see all of Munchen.  There, there’s the Frauenkirche, and the Rathaus.  Remember?

            I remembered.  I remembered the Frauenkirche cathedral, and the Rathaus city hall, even if I couldn’t pronounce them right.  My mother corrected me until I learned it.  Like the car BMW.  It wasn’t BMW like in English, it was Bay Em Vay: Bayerishe Motoren Werke.  Bavarian Motor Works, I told the kids in class.  Munchen was in Bavaria, the best part of Germany, and in Munchen they built Bay Em Vays.  BMWs, the kids argued.  My dad has one! A kid insisted.  It’s called a BMW!

            Stupid kids in my class, they didn’t know their German.  So I corrected them.   They got mad and called me a jerk.

            The TV news had stories and movies of Munchen getting ready for the Olympiad.  All the nations were coming to Munchen.  My mother was so proud and happy there were tears in her eyes.

            Now the world can see that Germans can do good things too, she said.  Now maybe they’ll forget about all this crap with the war.  Germans can build marvelous cities, and we Germans can have the entire world come to Munchen for sport and there can be peace and forgiveness.

            I didn’t really understand.  Why should the world be mad at Germany about the war, when the world smashed Germany to pieces?  Shouldn’t Germany be mad at the Americans and the British and especially the Russians?

            Then the TV program changed.  Instead of movies of the Germany I had visited, with the Olympiastadt, ladies in short short skirts and men with sideburns like hippies, there were soldiers in helmets, smoke, and burning towns.  My mother’s face twisted and reddened.  Then the soldiers were gone and there were skinny bald people in striped uniforms clutching a barbed wire fence and staring at the camera.  They looked sick and dizzy and not caring that there were flies buzzing around their heads.  The announcer said a lot of things that I didn’t understand about war and camps and then he said the name Hitler and there was a movie of Hitler.  I had seen pictures of Hitler before.  He looked funny with his square little moustache and his twisted lemon-eating face.  On the TV he was on a platform in front of millions of people in uniforms and he was shouting and waving his arms, slapping his side with a glove.  That was the first time I saw a movie of Hitler and I thought, he looks like he’s ranting and raving, which is what my mother called my old man’s screaming fits. My old man did look like that, but so did my mother when she screamed, only not as ugly.

            Goddammit!   My mother hissed.  They can never say anything about Germany without bringing up Hitler and the Nazis!  When are they gonna forget about what happened?  It’s been thirty years.  We suffered too, you know.  The whole country was blasted to bits!

            My parents liked to take trips up the New York Thruway, to places like Fort Ticonderoga, Lake George, and to visit all the Summer Oktoberfests.  We saw a glass blower that summer at one Oktoberfest.  I remembered his demonstration now, as I watched my old man’s face shifting like dark glass being worked in the fire, twisting and turning in the flame.

            Forget?  He barked.  The world should forget those murderous sons of bitches and the war they made?

            What do you know about it?  my mother cried.  You didn’t fight, you drove a jeep and got kicked out of the Army for being a lazy bastard.  You weren’t bombed or starved, or frozen alive!

            Blame your Nazi bastards for that, blame your Hitler and your Goebbels!  I should have sympathy when there was Auschwitz and Dachau?

            Oh, there goes the Jew with his Dachau!  That was years and years ago.  And what did we know of Dachau?  Nothing!  I lived 5 miles from it and didn’t know it existed.  That was the Nazis’ doing, that wasn’t the Germans.  As for anything else, we were good Germans, fighting a war.  And when you fight a war, you do like you are told!

            My old man leapt from his chair and stamped his slippered feet on the floor.

            Eichmanns, you were, Eichmanns!  Only following orders!

            Then go to Israel to be with your Jews!  With the Nazi hunters who drag poor old men out of bed so they can hang them by the throats!  Old men who were serving their country in a war.  How many got killed in Dresden by American pilots?  And the Americans walk free.  Why don’t they hunt Stalin’s butchers?  I’ll tell you why:  because no Jews were killed.  The unforgivable crime.  And you Jews won’t let anyone forget.  Which is easy for you, pulling strings everywhere, running Hollywood and television.  Take the TV away from the Jews, give the TV to somebody else and I bet there’ll be no more talk of Dachau and Auschwitz!

            At that moment the false mask of the household War was torn away and its true nature revealed.  Like the Wehrmacht’s relentless marches, the unending household battles were a veil hiding a dark agenda.  A murderous rage that was the twisted product of betrayal and injustice; kindled by opportunists and manipulated by madmen, it sought out scapegoats and packed crematoria with them.  The Krupps, the Porsches and the Generals gave license to the Hitlers and the Himmlers to forge an army of homunculi, an outraged nation, from the dirt of fear and anger.  Their march for justice was an uncontrollable stumble down the false path of vengeance, to Bergen-Belsen.  And my mother, one such lost homunculus, could do no better to stop herself.  She was an open vessel shaped by the songs and marches of the Hitler Youth, burdened by her own pliant grief, twisted, in a bitter cycle, into hate.

            My old man stood shivering and silent.  He wasn’t supposed to be silent.  He was supposed to rant and rave like Hitler.  But his angry bluff had failed.  And there was little courage to back it up.  Not enough to fight the dark force opposing him, let alone stand the shock of its exposure.  He wanted a quiet place to put up his feet and draw down the lights of his life, not a battle with an undead evil clutching at his wife’s soul.  He saw it clearly then, and he named it.

            A monster, he hissed.  You’re a monster.

            Yes, I’m a monster, my mother screamed, you married a Nazi monster!

My old man marched quickly upstairs.  He almost ran.  I heard him shut himself inside the bathroom.  My mother sat down on the sofa and sobbed.  She held her face in her hands.  The truth was too much for her, too.  I wanted to comfort her, but I was afraid to move.  The TV played on and on.  The news ended and a movie came on.  I heard my old man leave the bathroom.  I stiffened, expecting him to charge downstairs.  Instead he went to bed.  My mother stopped crying and stared at the TV movie.

My first trip to Synagogue

Excerpt from my childhood memoir When I Was German, available for Kindle at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
At Smashwords : https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
And at Apple using iBooks, search on "wynzel"
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel

             One day my old man stayed home from work.  He said to me, You and I, we’re Jews.  We’re Jews and you’re not going to school today, you’re going to synagogue with me.

            What are Jews, I asked.  His face was set and his voice was low.  I became afraid.
            Jews don’t believe Jesus is the son of God.  We don’t celebrate Christmas.  We have Hanukkah.  Do you remember it from last year?
            I did.
            Today is our new year.  It’s called Rosh Hashonah.  We count the years from when God created the earth.  Christians count the years since Christ’s birth.  We have over five thousand years.  And today we have to go to the synagogue.
            My mother dressed me in my best clothes and a warm coat to keep out the October cold.  I was stiff and quiet.  My mother was quiet too.  I’ll see you later, she said.
            My old man took me outside.  I didn’t say anything, but he answered my silent question by telling me that my mother wasn’t Jewish.  She wasn’t going.  We walk to temple on Rosh Hashonah, he said.  He took my hand and led me uptown to the synagogue.
            I had seen the sand-colored building with the big shiny dome before, but I never knew what it was.  Entire families were pouring inside the doors, hurrying in from the cold.  My old man gripped me tightly and pushed me in.  I was afraid of being in that unknown place and afraid of my old man.  He sounded and looked like he did when he tried to do something, pass a car on the road or adjust the antenna on the TV: his voice was low and deep, and his jaw worked silently.  There were no jokes or play allowed when he was like that.  If what he was doing didn’t work he would stamp his feet and scream.
            I was afraid he would do that in the synagogue.  I was afraid of all the people, even though they smiled and greeted me using words I didn’t understand.  Afraid of the caps, the yarmulkes, like the one my old man slapped on my head.  He pulled it out of a big wooden box.  He took one for himself, too.  A man has to wear this in the synagogue, he said.  You have to cover your head in God’s house.
            We squeezed inside a long room full of folding chairs, crowded with people dressed in their best clothes.  My old man handed me a book and we sat down.  My old man pointed out the man in a white robe standing at the front of the room.   He was the rabbi, and I was supposed to pray along with him.  I was supposed to read the prayers in the book in my hand.  My old man said, In Hebrew you read from right to left, not left to right, like in English.  I don’t know this alphabet, I whispered.  I only know the one I learned in school.  My old man whispered too: On one page is the Hebrew, and the opposite page is the English.  Try to match the words across the pages!
            I couldn’t.
            It was a very long day and I didn’t understand what was happening.  I stood up and sat down many times and soon I was very tired.  I saw people using their bibles to touch something wrapped in cloth that was carried up and down the aisle by the rabbi.  My old man told me to take my bible and touch it, too, but I couldn’t reach it.  He touched it and then he kissed his bible.
            Finally the prayers were all done.  A lot of people talked to my old man and they all invited him to, Come, come!  They wanted him to join the synagogue.  He told them he belonged to a temple in the Big City.  Then he took my hand and led me home, where my mother was waiting with hot soup and sandwiches.
            My old man told me that day that I was born a Jew.  He was a Jew, and because of that, I was a Jew.  My mother told me different.  Before I was born, she and my old man decided if I was a girl, I would be taught about Jesus.  And if I was a boy, I was to be raised a Jew.  It was their choice that decided what I was.  My old man heard this and was mad.  He’s a Jew! he yelled.  He was born a Jew!  My mother said no more and served me lunch.
            She had prepared my favorite sandwich, ham and cheese.  For my old man there was roast beef.  A Jew doesn’t eat ham or pork, he said.  And never meat with milk or cheese.  My mother knew this and never served it to him.  When she cooked pork chops for supper she used to fry him a small steak and on Passover she would buy matzo.  She did these things in the long-ago days, when I was little.  But that didn’t last.
            But I was a Jew and it was Rosh Hashonah and she served me a ham and cheese sandwich.  It was my favorite, like Christmas was my favorite holiday.  This was part of the war, a secret, newly unfolding front.
            I stopped eating when my old man announced that Jews don’t eat ham.  I waited, stomach twisting, for a fight.  I wondered if I should put the sandwich down.  My old man said no more.  Confused, but hungry, I finished the ham and cheese.
            My old man defined himself as a Jew and I was his Jewish son.  Why was I allowed ham and cheese and Christmas?  Easter presents, too?  I had to go to temple on the High Holy Days.  That was all the observance he required of me.  It seemed a compromise was going on, and a few things were forbidden.  For instance, I was not allowed in church.  When my old man found out a babysitter took me with her to church on Ash Wednesday, he raged.  I took no ash; instead, I cowered in the rear pew, not comprehending.  But it was still wrong.  And my mother, a Catholic, said no prayers, no Grace, hung no Crucifix.  Our bible was Old Testament.  I think in light of this my old man made no issue over pork roasts and Christmas trees.  If he had understood in time how my mother would exploit this he might have fought it.  When it was too late, he didn’t.  He protested, but it was bluster, threats without backbone.  My old man was not a determined man, and he gave up and let me fall away from him and the Jew he wanted me to be.

Bayonet and Gun Butts

My friend "Andrew" and I had similar, troubled, German homes.  We fought out our pain on imaginary battlefields, as imaginary German soldiers.


Excerpt from my childhood memoir When I Was German, available for Kindle at Amazon for just $.99:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
At Smashwords for FREE: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
And also:
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/When-I-Was-German/book-Yggik0p7ZUGyhMYqTTN2wg/page1.html?s=iVi7ZinlUkG-F-aEidZXYQ&r=1
At Inktera: http://www.inktera.com/store/title/06c86017-5f7a-4351-aef8-1ccfc9ff65bd
And at Apple using iBooks, search in iBooks on "wynzel"
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel
  

          It was bayonets and gun butts, fists and shovels. The Russians fought as Russians
do: like demons. We fought like men. And it was a very near thing.
        
          That time the victory was ours, but not without its cost. A fistful of ID tags filled
my pocket. We lay spent in the drifting echo of battle. Dark clouds hung low over us,
dark like our smoke-streaked faces. The battle had been won. But the war was lost, and
we knew it. Still, we fought on, because there was honor in just surviving. And because
we didn’t know how else to live.

          Andrew felt war like I did. We played it like a game, but it was no game. It was
a hopeless struggle, a titanic, earth-trembling combat between a warrior and a giant. The
warrior was doomed to lose. The Germans knew this. Still, they fought on, lost in the
fearful vastness of Russia, far from home. They fought to stave off Death for one more
day, and to avoid the most horrible fate of all: Siberia. To be taken by the Russians, to be
at the mercy of their barbaric passions, to vanish forever into the icy Siberian wilderness,
doomed to cut trees or mine salt forever, was the only thing a German soldier truly
feared. It was worse than death. It was to be lost forever, to be considered dead; back
home a headstone was erected over your empty grave while you toiled eternally in a hell
of harsh labor, frozen wind and Asian cruelty. Until one day, your half-naked body
finally, mercifully quit, and you were left where you dropped in a forest older than Time,
buried in snow that won’t melt until the Sun explodes a billion years from now.
Andrew was the only one who understood. In those days, we were like brothers.

          Together we hid the things we wanted to hide from everyone else. Together we saw, and
understood, what was happening in our homes. Being friends made us feel less alone in
our strange, secret lives. We had each other as allies. It was our world versus the rest of
the world.

          We were German together.

Time to Grow Up

My days of playing war outside come to an end.

When I Was German is now FREE at Smashwords: 
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144


         I was in high school. I was growing up. Suddenly I was as big as my old man.
And sadly, my days of playing war in the woods came to an end.

          It was winter and Andrew was Fencing. Mike had a job after school at the
library. Colin was away for his first year of college. I was completely alone.
I played a lot of war outside that winter. The snow was deep and I loved to fall
and die in its snug white embrace. And fighting in the snow was fighting in Russia;
struggling in the bitter freeze, shivering in a faded Wehrmacht trench coat.

        One gray afternoon I lay behind a fallen tree. My rifle lay across the trunk, the
barrel pointed towards the Russian positions. The woods were silent; had the Russians
spotted us, or had we stolen upon them unseen? I was pondering a covered route of
approach when the dry brush line behind me crashed open. I spun around and four kids
almost stepped on me.

         Sorry, man.

         It was Jack, one of the kids from Elder Drive. He was a year younger than me.
He was a burnout, a kid who smoked dope. He was with three other burnouts I didn’t
recognize. They smelled like pot. They stopped and stared down at me and my rifle.
One kid smiled like he thought he should laugh but then his glazed eyes drifted off,
beyond me, further into the mist of gray fog and black tree trunks.

        Without saying anything else the four continued deeper into the woods, toward
the Russian positions. I watched them fade into the gray confused depth. Were those
tree trunks moving from side to side, or was it the burnouts?

       I felt the difference between them and me. It was the feeling I felt in school, like I
always had, of being outside. Of being weird.

       I was fifteen years old and I was playing war by myself. The burnouts were
younger than me, but they were already doing cool things, hanging out, going to parties,
growing up.

       Sex made me see this more clearly. I knew that I would never get any girls
playing war in the woods like a little freak. I would only get girls if I had friends and
went to parties. If I did cool things, like collecting rock albums, going to the mall,
drinking beer or smoking reefer.

      There was an empty spot inside me, and it ached. That ache was pushing me,
driving me toward something.

      I stood up and hurried home in the opposite direction of the burnouts. I was lucky
they were so stoned or they would have laughed at me. Maybe even beaten me up for
being a freak.

      I played war outside a few more times. Always looking over my shoulder for
somebody. It wasn’t very fun that way. I couldn’t lose myself in the action.
One day I raced around a corner in the trail, shouting for the platoon to follow
me, and there were people there. It was a guy and a girl, holding hands. They were
heading up the trail, straight into my battlefield. They looked at me, surprised. And
annoyed. They were holding each other very close and carrying a blanket. They were
looking for a place to make out. I was embarrassed and flushed hot and wanted to run
away. I tried to act like nothing was wrong; I headed off the trail, away from them
towards the creek gully and escape. The girl watched me and giggled. The guy pulled
her away, and they were gone.

      I plunged into the gully. I couldn’t do this anymore. It was over. My war play
was finished. I was too old to be caught playing kid games. I didn’t want to be the class
freak, I didn’t want to be Ooofy again. I couldn’t help it. I wanted girls and I couldn’t
get them if I was a war nut.

      I limped home, hiding my rifle, hiding it in shame for the first time ever, under
my trench coat. I knew I still had my tanks. I had board games too, wargames on maps,
sophisticated, realistic games far beyond simple games like Risk and Stratego. I could
still play war, I consoled myself. I just had to hide it.

      But I wanted to cry anyway. No tears came. My old man said, you’re in early,
too cold for you? I ignored him. I didn’t want a fight. I wanted my woods back, I
wanted to play there but all that had slipped away. Now I was slipping myself, so fast
my face burned from the wind, toward new things I wanted and feared at the same time.
My rifle was assigned an undeserved fate. A betrayal, really, considering how
faithful it had been to me. I stood it in the back of the coat closet and left it there forever.

     I laid out a force of model tanks on the dining room table and tried to forget.

Please visit my poetry blog, "Poems from Elm Street"

I've just created a poetry blog, "Poems from Elm Street" and will begin posting soon.

Please visit:  http://poemsfromelmstreet.blogspot.com/

The Seventh Round: Opening Lines

The opening lines of my novel, The Seventh Round, to be published in the near future.


(My childhood memoir When I Was German is available on Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
And also:
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/When-I-Was-German/book-Yggik0p7ZUGyhMYqTTN2wg/page1.html?s=iVi7ZinlUkG-F-aEidZXYQ&r=1
At Inktera: http://www.inktera.com/store/title/06c86017-5f7a-4351-aef8-1ccfc9ff65bd
And at Apple using iBooks, search in iBooks on "wynzel"
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel)

THE SEVENTH ROUND

            Monday.  It’s an hour before dawn.  The apartment is cold.  I haven’t turned up the heat yet.  I can’t afford it.  Later on, I will.  For now I huddle on the sofa, shivering in an old quilt.  The leather sofa is my bed when my kids are here.  The leather is hard and cold like the jagged shards of frosted grass outside.

            The gun rests in my hands.  Also cold and dead.  But pregnant with possibilities.

            The gun is a .38 caliber revolver with a seven-round cylinder, cast in steel alloy.  Rendered in a deep blue unseen in the dark.  I feel the heft of it, the solidity of the thing, as I stroke the smooth metal with my fingers and thumbs.  I take it in my right hand.  A perfect fit, as if custom-made.  I finger the trigger and thumb the hammer.  I never gave much thought to guns before, but now I understand.  The shape, the weight, the easy fit in the hand.   The power inherent.  The potential.  The gun forge may follow the blueprint, but the design was cast from the base yearnings of the soul.

            I open and spin the empty cylinder.  The action is even, fluid.  It shuts with a soft click.  I haven’t loaded it yet.  It isn’t time.

            I have to get up now.  I wrap the gun in a hand towel and, feeling my way in the darkness, slide it with a tinkling of glass behind the bottles of vodka, gin, and tequila in the liquor cabinet.  I set it beside the box of shells.  Withdrawing my hand, I tip the gin bottle, and catch it just by instinct.  I’m well accustomed with handling those bottles in the dark.

            Now into the kitchen, where I shut the louvered door behind me, turn on the light, and put water on for coffee.  In silence, I will have breakfast then tiptoe to the toilet for an hour-long struggle to clear my bleeding bowels, a task never completed, and finished with the painstaking easing of my screaming hemorrhoids back inside myself.  Holding my breath and praying that they don’t rupture completely.  When that is all done, I will turn on the heat, awaken my kids and take them to school.  Then I will go to work.

I will leave the gun here, for now.

 

 

Hannukkah, Ham and Cheese, and Christmas

In this excerpt from my memoir, Christmas knocks Hannukkah to the mat.  A ten count KO.

My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
And also:
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/When-I-Was-German/book-Yggik0p7ZUGyhMYqTTN2wg/page1.html?s=iVi7ZinlUkG-F-aEidZXYQ&r=1
At Inktera: http://www.inktera.com/store/title/06c86017-5f7a-4351-aef8-1ccfc9ff65bd
And at Apple using iBooks, search in iBooks on "wynzel"
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel

          At Hanukkah my old man told me the story of the lights again. He lit the candles
for eight nights, but I wasn’t interested. Christmas was coming very soon. I knew there
wasn’t a Santa Claus any more, I was after all growing big and smart, that instead there
was someone better, my mother, who would get me almost everything on my Christmas
list. I was too busy picking out toys and making my list to pay attention to the dreidle
and the chocolate gelt.

          We had a huge Christmas tree. My mother hurt herself putting it up. It wouldn’t
stay in the stand. She had to tie it to nails hammered into the wall. And she wasn’t
happy when she was finished. It wasn’t a German Christmas.

          I felt sorry for my mother. Her German Christmas was gone. Now all she had
was the American Christmas, with all its crazy gift giving she hated, and all the spoiling
of children she complained about.

          Despite that, the Christmas tree was surrounded by a pile of bright gift boxes,
each taped and wrapped tightly by her. I was given everything I had asked for. More
things than I could play with. Was I a greedy American kid who had it too easy? Was I
spoiling my mother’s Christmas?

          Or was my mother the spoiler because she couldn’t let go of the past? Was the
grief from her lost German Christmases, for her vanished father and her ruined country
so strong that it destroyed her capacity for joy? That it drove her to shame me for the
gifts she gave?

          How did my old man feel about Christmas? I don’t celebrate Christmas, he said.
I’m a Jew. You’re a Jew. But your mother likes to have her Christmas, to give presents.
It’s an American holiday now. Jews can go and celebrate with Gentiles, that’s okay, but
we don’t believe in Jesus. We don’t bring Jesus into Christmas.

          And neither did my mother. She lamented that Christmas was supposed to be
about something special. She wouldn’t say what, but I knew she meant Jesus. She knew
my old man wouldn’t allow that. She compensated by spoiling me. I don’t think he
realized how each new toy was another clod of earth burying Chanukkah and my
Jewishness. It was another facet of my mother’s secret battle, but no longer so secret that
he couldn’t have seen it. My mother kept undoing their agreement: If he is a boy we
will raise him as a Jew. And tragically, my old man, magnanimous about Christmas and
ham and cheese sandwiches, helped her.

          My birthday came soon after Christmas. I got more presents. That was good
because I had already smashed a lot of my Christmas presents. Ripped up the game
pieces, sent the trains flying down the cellar steps, smashed the Hot Wheels that didn’t
race fast enough with bricks pulled from the crumbled walkway alongside the house.
My mother was very mad at me. Why, she screamed, do you wreck your toys? What’s
the matter with you? Why don’t you appreciate what you have?

          I did appreciate what I had. But I didn’t deserve it when German children had
nothing in the war. I undid my mother’s mistake in spoiling me. It was easy because
more toys were always coming.

The Mayor's Old Clothes

In this excerpt my father is showing me samples from his newly acquired wardrobe of Salvation Army Thriftstore castoffs.  Now retired and bored, he likes to get dressy for his trips to the local Senior Citizen Center where the residents have dubbed him the "Mayor".  Their sarcasm escaped him.  I'm about 13 at the time.


 My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
And also:
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                         Look at this, my old man cried, jabbing his finger into the label inside his new sports coat.  Once it had been red.  Now it was old and ghostly pink.  Frays gathered on the elbows.

            Abercrombie and Fitch!  It’s a beautiful jacket!  Where can you find something like this?
           Wrapped around a corpse in the bottom of a coffin, I told him.
           Today my old man is a corpse in the bottom of a coffin.  There is no marker over his grave.  Just earth and grass.  I don’t know what jacket he is buried in, if any.  There is silence, and blackness, where he lays.  What is he dressed in?  The funeral home said they would dress the body.  With what?  He had nothing.  He must lay wrapped in a sheet, and nothing else.
          What corpse?  What’s the matter with you, boy?  This is a sharp coat.  Look at this!  It fits great.  And I got a neckerchief to go with it.
          My old man yanked a bright blue handkerchief from the breast pocket of the jacket.  It shone like silk, but it couldn’t have been silk, because my old man paid a quarter for it.  With his knobby claws he snapped it into a short tie that hung around his neck like a loose lady’s choker.
         This is the way you wear it, he announced with pride.
         No, I thought, that’s the way you wore it forty years ago.  But to my old man, there was no difference between forty years ago and today.  He lived in the black and white world of Channel Nine, Channel Five, and Channel Eleven.  Maybe, I thought, if my mother could afford a color TV, my old man might realize the passing of time.
        It looks like shit, I told him.  My old man growled and stormed away.

Failed Gambit--Return from the Bad Trip

In this excerpt my mother and I are back home in NJ after a traumatic 12 week trip to Germany in which she attempted to escape my father by staying in Munich permanently.  My father eventually threatened to call the authorities, and we had to go back.  While we were gone he sold my Peugot 10-speed bike to pay the rent and my mother never forgave him for it.

My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
And also:
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
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                         In my house it seemed the German trip never happened.  Nothing had changed.  My mother got her two jobs back, and she worked day and night.  The War plodded on.  The pattern of long silences broken by terrible fights resumed.  The house was freezing.  There was bronchitis and asthma attacks.

             No, things had changed.  They were worse.
            There was no more Hanukkah.  One snowy December morning my old said, You know today is Hanukkah, don’t you?  I didn’t.  He was mad.  That was our Hanukkah.
            I didn’t care.  I couldn’t stand to see him anymore.  We yelled at each other all the time.  We called each other Asshole and Sonofabitch and Stupid Jerk.
           There were no more family trips.  There were no more short periods of polite talk between my mother and old man.  There was either silence, or fighting.  And there was nothing new to fight about, except my Peugeot bicycle.
            My mother mentioned it every day, as if she had to keep fueling our indignation.  I can’t believe your old man sold your bike, she would say for no reason at all.  What kind of a father sells his son’s bicycle?  She told all her friends.  And she screamed at my old man about it.
            It didn’t bother me.  I missed having a bike, it was true, but when I tried to get mad at my old man for selling mine, nothing happened.  I didn’t feel angry.  I didn’t care.  But I grew sick of hearing about it.  I knew, without being able to say it, that it was all that stood between war and an end to war.
          I was changing.  I was tall, now.  And thin.  My face wasn’t round anymore, it was long.  I stopped looking like my mother, and I began to look like my old man.
          I stared in the mirror, at my long face, into my deep-set eyes.  I looked like him.  Would I become like him too?  Would I become a No Good bum someday?
         And the more I changed, the less I cared about what happened in my house.  It took some time, but I realized I just wanted out.  I wanted the same thing I cried about in Germany the night before my mother cancelled our flight home.  I wanted the fighting to end.  I wanted to go with my mother someplace away from my old man and never come back.
         My mother still talked about leaving, too.  Despite the bicycle, she was breaking down, slowly.   She took me to look at apartments.
         Let’s go, I told her now.  Let’s get out of that house.
        But she was still afraid.
        Oh, I can’t do it.  I have no money.  I have to save more money.
        Or it was winter and it was too cold to move.
        Or she didn’t like the apartment.
        Or she didn’t want to leave me without a father.
         Every kid needs a father.  I never left because I didn’t want to take you away from your old man.
         I don’t care.  Let’s just go!
         She was afraid.  Your old man will probably try to kill me if I leave him.
         I worried about that too.  But I really didn’t think he would do it.

The Bad Trip

In this excerpt, my mother and I embark at Kennedy Airport for our 5th trip to Germany, which we made in the summer before I began 8th grade.

My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM

And also:
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             My mother planned another trip to Germany.  A big one.           

             I have money saved and they will let me take time from my jobs, she said.  I told them Oma is sick.  I lied but I don’t care.  We’re going to leave after July Fourth and stay seven weeks.  You’ll be back in time to start school.

                        I thought that was a long time.  I wanted to play war with Andrew and Colin and ride my bike all summer.  At the same time I knew I would have a lot of chances in Germany to buy more wargame models, things I couldn’t find at home.

                        You’ll really learn great German.  You’ll be an expert by the time we come home.  You’ll learn more than you did in German school.

                        Why are we staying seven weeks?

                        I’ve got to get away from you old man for a while.  Two or three weeks just isn’t enough, I need at least a month’s vacation from him.  And while I’m gone he’ll find out what it’s like without a slave of a woman to cook and clean for him, to wash his dirty underpants.  Maybe if we’re lucky he’ll get sick of it after a couple weeks and go find some other stupid woman and take up with her.  That would be good, if he would just leave.  But he’ll probably stick around until I go crazy or drop dead, and then you’ll be left to take care of yourselves, or get put in foster care like he did with his other sons.

                        My old man was mad that we would be away for so long.  But my mother told him the lie about my Oma being sick, so he shut up. 

                        My old man dropped us off at Kennedy Airport, like he always did.  He didn’t stay long.  He kissed us with his scratchy, sweaty face and hurried away, turning and waving his arms.

                        Look at that idiot, my mother said.  My old man was waving both arms over his head like a leathered castaway signaling a vanishing ship.  Except things were backwards, it was him and not the rescue ship that was slowly vanishing into an erratic swell of human waves.  Then he was gone.

                        And as much as I didn’t want to, I felt sad to see him go. I bit my lip and hated myself for it until I wasn’t sad any more.

                        My mother sagged in her terminal seat.  She sank inside our palisade of luggage.  Thank God he’s gone.  Now I can relax.  She covered her face with her hand and she wept a little.

                        Her tears were a premonition: it would be a bad trip.  A very bad trip.

The Boy Turns

An excerpt from my childhood memoir When I Was German.  Some context:  it's a Saturday morning during a rainy spring in our broken down rented house on Lake Valley Road.  I'm about 11 years old.  My father launches an angry rant against my mother, who will no longer let him take the car.  And I, long a witness to their ongoing war and, manipulated into sympathizing with her, take up the fight on her behalf.

My book is available:
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           Spring was cold and wet.  The winter’s snow sank into pools of mud and ooze.  The mud was ripe with the smell of the Green to come, and rank with all the Dead things freed from their tomb of snow and ice.  Clouds drifted no higher than treetops, unsure of what to do.  They clung to the empty branches.  The trees shivered and were black with freezing rain.
          Our house was cold and damp.  It smelled wet and rotten.  I remembered the kittens in the bag atop the storm drain.  And it smelled sharp; it burned my nose like a bottle of floor cleaner waved under my nose.  The basement was flooded, and the water drew the stink of Friskie’s old piss and his crap from the floor.  Clots of dog hair gathered in low spots in the cellar.  I saw kittens in them.  Friskie sat nervously, slept without resting, on the steps, so he wouldn’t get wet.  A four-inch salamander clung to the basement wall.  There was a sump pump down there, but it was broken.  Only I thought we should call the landlady to get it fixed.
          It was Saturday and my mother took the Plymouth to work.  She didn’t want my old man driving it anymore.  It’s my car, she said, I paid for it and I hold the title.  I don’t want you racing my car around anymore, ruining it, it’s getting old.
          She told me goodbye and she left.  The Plymouth slipped like fingers into a pocket of morning mist and was gone.
          I was eating cereal and watching the Road Runner.  My old man sat with his tea, clinking his spoon, slurping the mug dry with the sound the sump pump made when it used to work.  He was mad.  He stared at Wile E. Coyote like he wanted kill him with daggers that would shoot from his pupils.
           I waited.
           It came.
           My old man barked.  So now I can’t take the car, huh?  You mother won’t let me take the car on Saturdays.  I wreck the car!  I ruin it!  Who’s been taking care of it all these years, how many times we’ve gone to Wayne and Bob’s for service?  Huh?  How many times have I taken you?
           Hey Bob, hey Wayne, come on, grease the car and change the oil!  Bob and Wayne hated my old man.  I hated to go.  I wouldn’t go anymore.
           You know, boy, without a car, I can’t take you to Mike’s.  I can’t pick him up or take him home.  How you gonna visit with your pals, huh?  If your mother doesn’t let me take the car?  Her car?  It’s my goddamn car too, so I let her sign the title that day, so what, I hadda go to work so she went to the dealer and signed, and that makes it her car?  Who picked it out and test drove it?
            My old man leapt up.   He leaned over me as I lay on the sofa.  He worked his ugly, smelly mouth, he clacked his few yellow teeth.  Spit flew from his ugly hole.  He waved his claws in the air.  A giant, ugly old crow staggering on bony legs, flapping wings, squawking, jerking, louder and louder.
           So your mother doesn’t like that I retire, so she protests.  Yeah.  Let me ask you, in Mike’s house, or your other pals’ homes, do the parents sleep together?  Do their mothers sleep in another room?
            No, I said.
            No, of course not.  Your mother don’t like that I retire.  So she makes a protest, she gets her own bedroom and she takes away the car.  Well I got news for you boy, I got news for her too, I worked for fifty years!  Fifty goddamn years!  I busted my hump and I paid my Social Security, I paid my union dues, and now I’m done.  You hear that?
            I heard him.
            We’re getting four checks where we used to get one.  I get one, you get one, she gets one, and then I get my pension from the union.  Plenny of money.  Money your mother is getting from when I worked long before I ever knew her.  You hear me?
            I heard him.  On and on and on, squawking and crowing.  He banged his feet on the floor.  On and on, yelling screaming squawking spitting, stinking up the air. 
            I sat still and watched, while he screamed and stomped, on and on, without seeing, without knowing.
            I would make him see and know.
            Shutup!  I yelled.
            My old man’s head jerked back.  His ugly trap shut.
            Now, I was screaming.
            Just shutup, shutup, shut the fuck up!
            I leapt up and waved my hands in his ugly dark face.  He backed away a step and stiffened.  He was locked in place, an old man statue carved from old wood.
            I’m sick of your shit!  You lazy No Good sonofabitch!  What do you know?  All you do is lay around on your ass all day, you don’t do nothing, you don’t help out with the wash or the shopping or the cleaning or anything!  Mom has to work two jobs and you make peanuts!  You don’t want to do anything while she has to slave all day and night for you, for our money and our food and you don’t deserve it!  You’re nothing but a stupid loud-mouth idiot and you belong in the nuthouse, all you do for her is cause her trouble and make her miserable!  She suffered enough in the war without your bullshit on top of it!
           At that moment the War owned me.   If I hadn’t been screaming my head off I would have heard it chuckling.  On signal, the Krupps and I.G. Farbens stoked their furnaces and oiled their puppet strings.  The Hitlers and the Ludendorffs hatched strategies from immolated graves.  The Speers and the Riefenstahls, eyes covered and blind to consequence, sniffed the air for opportunities.  And I charged forward with all the self-righteous fury of the millions of deceived pawns who came before me.
           I was screaming from the top of the stairs.  How did I get up there?  My old man was still in the same place.  He stared at me with black dots in white circles.  That and two clenched fists were all I saw.
          Why my old man never used those fists on me for what I said that day, or worse things I would say, is beyond me.  Nor is why he didn’t confront my mother for turning me against him.  Didn’t he see it?  He would argue, and call me names, angry at me for my turning, but he never hit me.  I suppose he thought he would lose me, and the roof over his head and the meals he couldn’t cook for himself and the laundry he didn’t know how to wash.  Instead, he plied me from time to time with remembrances of cars, the black eye I gave him and everything else that had slipped away since November, 1970.  He did what he could, in his angry, faulted way, to win me back.
           What success he had, he didn’t live to see.

Throwing the Game--a short story

A short story about a man who escaped Vietnam...but couldn't escape the rat race.

And please see my childhood memoir, When I Was German, available:
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Throwing the Game

 

            Nick shut the office door.  He was remembering Vietnam.

            Firebase Cox had no earthbound anchor.  It pitched screaming atop a roaring sea of mud in a storm of flame and mortar fire.   To tip from the edge of the earth was its certain destiny.  It was Nick’s second night in-country.  He lay in the cool mud, wrapped in fear around the tree roots winding through the slit trench.  When the sergeant crawled past and shouted for him to shoot, Nick leapt and banged away with his M16.  Once the sergeant passed, he fell and clutched the roots again.  Rations and water were passed forward, ammunition replenished, even the Captain slithered past in the mud.  The NVA kept coming through the wire.  But to Nick it was all just one long storm.
            Broken only the Hueys.  They brought the supplies and replacements.  Like they brought in Nick, “the stupid, pot smoking ass who failed out of college and the Army got him”, his old man had said.  “Screwing around with his guitar when he should have been working on his Accounting degree, should have passed his exams no sweat since his old man is an accountant!”
            “Accounting is a lot of calculation, Nicky,” his old man continued, “but it’s all for the purpose of a final reckoning: what’s the value of something?  And this Vietnam, it’s not worth your life.  I can’t help you now.”  And his tearful father turned and hurried away, leaving Nick dumbstruck on the parade ground.  Then the sergeants cried out from the idling buses and all the new soldiers embarked to meet their destinies in Asia.
            Nick’s destiny was Firebase Cox.  A Huey brought him in.  But they didn’t leave empty.  They took the wounded home.
            And on his second night in Vietnam, with the NVA closing in, Nick performed his own calculations and made his own reckoning.
            With none of his squad in sight, he stuck his left foot in a small crater in the trench.  His own live hand grenade followed.  He lay back and began to scream before it even blew.
            When he awoke he was in a hospital in the Philippines.  There was a nub where his left foot should have been.  It hung all day and night from a wire before him.  He didn’t look at it.
            Three days later an Army lawyer came, sat down, and began asking questions.  His name was Captain Ballard.
            “How did your own hand grenade detonate in the trench, Private Taylor?”
            “I threw it at some gooks.”
            “They were in the trench?”
            “No, out by the perimeter wire.”
            “So how did your grenade detonate in the trench if the enemy was out by the wire?”
            “I guess they threw the grenade back at me.”
            “And it went in the shell hole.  And your foot was there.”
            “I don’t remember, sir.  Maybe I kicked it in the hole.  I’m in a lot of pain, sir.”
            Ballard closed his notebook.
            “I know what happened, Private.  You should do ten or more in Leavenworth for it.  The war isn’t over on the ground but it’s long finished in the hearts and minds.  So what’s the sense?” Ballard stood.  “You’ll get a Purple Heart.  Notch it for score one in your favor.”
            “Yes sir.”
            “What are you going to do when you get home, Private?”
            “Go back to college, sir.  Become an accountant like my dad.  Follow the straight and narrow.”
            Ballard snorted and left.
            Thirty years later Nick sat in his cool, quiet office.  He was a financial analyst for a major corporation.  He had taken the straight and narrow path and come to hate it.  He wondered whether he had lived his life since Vietnam for his father’s sake or to atone for the silent ugly thing in his left shoe.
            It didn’t matter.  He didn’t want to do this shit anymore.  And soon he wouldn’t have to.  Only a few knew, he amongst them:  the company was bankrupt.  The books had been cooked, the earnings statements were lies and despite the quiet hum of the air conditioning and the peaceful throng in the corridors, the firebase was about to be overrun.  The NVA were pouring through the wire and the whole corruption was about to pitch off the edge of the earth.  Nick wasn’t high enough to be implicated, but he knew.  The company was broke and they would all lose their jobs, their pensions, and their stock.
            Nick had three kids in college.  He was already carrying two mortgages on his house.  And he was fifty and didn’t want to start all over again.
            But Nick knew one other thing.  The company was very well insured for liability.  It had to be, since it was a shipping company.  Employees didn’t just slam their thumbs in file cabinets.  In Nick’s company they were sometimes crushed by falling crates, fell from the backs of tractor trailers, or were even run over by speeding forklifts.
            Like Nick was later that week while on an auditing assignment at a regional site.  He was crossing the warehouse floor on his way to the cafeteria, just emerging from behind a cluster of pallets when he was hit.  It was funny how he didn’t look before he crossed the redlined forklift byway.  The speeding machine crushed his right foot.
            A lawyer came to Nick within a day.  He talked about dangerous conditions on the site, poor lighting, obstructions, and improper operation of heavy equipment.  The lawyer promised a big settlement.  Nick hired him, scrawling his name in a morphine-looped script across the contract.
            A few weeks later the lawyer came to his home.  Nick was strumming the guitar his son had bought him.  “We can jam together, Dad,” his son had said.  His son was nineteen and played in a band.  Nick smiled.
            Nick and the lawyer were sitting on the sofa when the handicap-access limo, sent by the company, arrived to take them to lunch at the best restaurant in town.
            The lawyer slapped Nick on the back.  “Looks real good,” he said.
            “It does,” said Nick.
            “The company lawyers and the insurance company lawyer are going to be there.  Don’t say anything but hello.  I’ll do all the talking.  Just enjoy your lunch and relax.” 
The company lawyers were friendly and deferential.  They asked Nick about his progress.  Nick shrugged and sighed while his attorney explained that Nick would experience pain for the rest of his life and would likely never walk again.
The insurance company lawyer was late.  He didn’t arrive until the salad course was served.
            “Mr. Taylor, a pleasure to meet you,” he said.  “I’m Steven Ballard.”
            “Captain,” Nick paled and fainted in his mixed greens.
            He was surrounded by four concerned attorneys and the restaurant manager when he came to.
            “Do you want to go home?  We can postpone the meeting until later in the week.”
            “No.”  Nick looked at Ballard.  “No, forget the meeting.  Forget the whole damn thing.”
            “Nick, let’s get you home,” his lawyer said.
            “No.”  Nick nodded at Ballard.  “He knows me.  The game is up.  I walked in front of the forklift.  I did it on purpose, for the money.  Just like I wanted out of Vietnam, so I fragged my own foot.  He was there.  He knew my game.  Right, Ballard?”
            Ballard said nothing.
            The company lawyers stormed off, outraged and threatening a countersuit.  Nick’s lawyer stared at him for a long time.  Then he shook his head and rose.
            “Better find yourself a good attorney, Mr. Taylor.  An expert in Insurance Fraud.”
            Ballard remained, staring.
            “So, what are you going to tell me? Now justice is done?”  Nick said.
            “No.  You should have kept your mouth shut.”
            “Why?”
            “I knew it was you as soon as I saw the paperwork.  I never forgot you.  For a long time I despised you for what I thought was cowardice and treachery.  But that was too simple an explanation. Dammit, you took your own foot to get out of a bad place!  Maybe, I came to think, it took courage to do something like that to survive.”
            “No.  I’m a coward.  And I’m sick, so very, very sick.”
            “I don’t think so.  Taylor, I’m in the trench now.  I was in practice with a crooked partner.  He made shady deals and we went bankrupt.  Now I’m lucky to have this job with the insurance company, and it doesn’t pay worth shit.  The bank is foreclosing on my home.  We would have paid you a million to keep this out of court.  I was pushing for it, for you.  And me.  We could have split it.”
            Nick fought the impulse to pitch beneath the table.
            “You tried it twice, Taylor.  But you’re only one for two, because you threw the game, you fool.”
            Ballard shrugged and left.

           

***