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    When I Was German
    When I Was German
    When I Was German
    Ebook325 pages5 hours

    When I Was German

    By Alan Wynzel

    2.5/5

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    The relentless crash of falling bombs, blackened, ruined cities, and a bitter conflict between a German and a Jew. A World War II story? No. Instead it was the daily fare of a boy born in suburban New Jersey in 1964. His mother was a refugee from the wreckage of postwar Munich whose unforgiving wartime memories ran like blood into the ears of her young American son. His father, a New York City Jew, had little sympathy for the sufferings of Germans. They were, after all, the monsters that created Auschwitz.

    The young boy struggled to survive and grow in this shell-shocked home. His mother, through love and guile, made him an ally in her war against his father. The boy escaped, for a while, into a fantasy world of comic books and war play where the Germans were the good guys and his father was the bad guy. But adolescence came, unforgiving as a rolling barrage. A lonesome night with a razor blade was the catalyst that led him to begin the hard road to maturity and freedom.
    I was this boy. After my father’s death, I needed to understand my life with him and my mother, and the only way I could was to tell it as a story. When I Was German, my childhood memoir, was the result.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlan Wynzel
    Release dateSep 10, 2013
    ISBN9781301341641
    When I Was German
    Author

    Alan Wynzel

    I was born and raised in Morristown, NJ. The years I spent there in a home on Lake Valley Road shaped my life and my writing, which began there, when I was 11. My childhood memoir, When I Was German, tells that story. Now, at 49, I'm still writing. I'm divorced, have two teenaged kids, and was out of work for almost 2 years in the Great Recession. I've been writing about that, too. A novel, The Seventh Round, that I will publish soon, tells that story. And another is in the works. I'm most prolific, and adept, at telling my own life story, whether in memoir, or fiction. Like Hemingway said, write what you know. As for the writers I most admire, well, Hemingway, of course. And Bukowski...I can't read any other poetry but his. Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, George Orwell, and Mark Twain.

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