Author Interview, 2/23/2014

An interview with me was posted today on the blog of fellow writer Danica Cornell (Twitter @ DanicaCornell) 

See it here:  http://danica-cornell.com/2014/02/23/an-interview-with-author-alan-wynzel/

A Disclaimer for When I Was German

Readers please note that I use minimal punctuation and do not quote dialogue in When I Was German.  I have done this for stylistic reasons because the narrative is primarily an internal monologue, with the narrator relating much of the dialogue.  My intention was for the story to flow as smoothly as possible and I feel this has been achieved by my approach.

This style of writing is not for every reader.  Many readers are more comfortable with "standard" amounts of punctuation and having all dialogue quoted in order to better follow who is speaking.

Having great respect for the literary achievements of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Cormac McCarthy, I suppose it is natural that I would be inspired by their style.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/cormac-mccarthys-punctuation-rules.html

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.