An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust

Two men, who meet and become good friends after enjoying successful adult lives in California, have experienced childhoods so tragically opposed that the two men must decide whether to talk about them or not. In 1944, 13-year-old Fritz was almost old enough to join the Hitler Youth in his German village of Kleinheubach. That same year in Tab, Hungary, 12-year-old Bernie was loaded onto a train with the rest of the village's Jewish inhabitants and taken to Auschwitz, where his whole family was murdered. How to bridge the deadly gulf that separated them in their youth, how not to allow the power of the past to separate them even now, as it separates many others, become the focus of their friendship, and together they begin the project of remembering. The separate stories of their youth are told in one voice, at Bernat Rosner's request. He is able to retrace his journey into hell, slowly, over many sessions, describing for his friend the "other life" he has resolutely put away until now. Frederic Tubach, who must confront his own years in Nazi Germany as the story unfolds, becomes the narrator of their double memoir. Their decision to open their friendship to the past brings a poignancy to stories that are horrifyingly familiar. Adding a further and fascinating dimension is the counterpoint of their similar village childhoods before the Holocaust and their very different paths to personal rebirth and creative adulthood in America after the war. Seldom has a memoir been so much about the present, as we see the authors proving what goodwill and intelligence can accomplish in the cause of reconciliation. This intimate story of two boys trapped in evil and destructive times, who become men with the freedom to construct their own future, has much to tell us about building bridges in our public as well as our personal lives.

History

Tubach, Frederic C.

Tubach, Sally Patterson

Rosner, Bernat

Europe

University of California Press

This is a haunting experimental novel about a daughter raped by her father, and the consequences of repressing this memory. In a parallel narrative, the father analyzes the posthumous writings of his daughter for clues to her thoughts and behavior. Memoirs of a Terrorist is a gripping experimental novel about a young woman raped at the age of fifteen by her father. Having repressed this crime from her conscious awareness, Megan Lloyd's short intense life becomes a quest for sexual and human identity. A privileged daughter from suburban southern California, the heroine writes about early periods of her life in revolutionary Berkeley as well as later events in Malibu, Dallas, Munich, and finally, Paris. Her failure to bring the repressed crime to consciousness reveals a tragic blind spot from which emerges the sexual bondage murder of her lover in a Munich hotel. The heroine's internal story is told by her fragmentary diaries and stories that her father retrieves after her death as a suspected terrorist in Europe. As he approaches his own death years later, Arthur Lloyd attempts to comprehend his daughter by analyzing her texts, and finally confesses his crime to the reader. Thus two narrative voices, one male and one female, intersect, clash, and reinforce each other in this rich and complex text that weaves a tale of sexual violence and portrays quests for insight and redemption. In Memoirs of a Terrorist the female body becomes the theater in which repression, gender, social relations, and haphazard natural events are played out. The novel is many things: a feminist picaresque story of development and decay, a psychological thriller, a haunting murder mystery and work of symbolism and myth in which the reader must ultimately answer the questions: Who is the real terrorist? Can the criminal find absolution? Is there any escape from the cycle of violence? Memoirs of a Terrorist confronts some of the most troubling issues of contemporary American society.

Memoirs of a Terrorist (Suny Series, the Margins of Literature)

Literature & Fiction

United States

State University of New York Press

Memoirs of a Terrorist: A Novel (Suny Series, Margins of Literature)

Contemporary

Can an elderly literary snob shape a middle-aged dilettante into a man of sufficient substance to neutralize the potential for evil in Hitler's identical twin? Cranky Myrtle Halstead, a wealthy resident of San Francisco's most elegant retirement highrise, becomes enamored of a man half her age--the suave and untrustworthy Bruno de Carlo. She resolves to school him in classic literature and turn him into a man of integrity. Unwittingly, she prepares the Italian American for an unprecedented task two decades following her death. He must turn Hitler's twin brother into a successful painter in order to keep him out of politics and save the world from another global catastrophe. A colorful cast of quirky characters moves the plot forward in a series of humorous missteps and misunderstandings. In this thought-provoking tale, nature and nurture compete over the souls of a jetsetter and of Hitler's twin brother in contemporary Baghdad by the Bay. In this singular, speculative, and heartwarming story, chance events can have enormous consequences. Find the surprising answer to an intriguing question of historical hindsight: What if Adolf Hitler had had a different profession?

The Grande Dame and Hitler's Twin: A Comedy of Errors

Genre Fiction

Resource Publications

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Books by Tubach, Sally Patterson