In the beginning

I wasn’t really certain where to start. I had 350 typed 8 1/2 x 11 pages in hand, neatly bound, that my father had spent weeks typing. In it were all his memories of childhood, growing up under Hitler, living in Germany through the first years of the war, and his truly miraculous escape to the US, And it didn’t end there. I hadn’t realized how much more happened after he arrived in New York. I had thought just getting out of Germany was the big story, but starting out in America as a poverty stricken immigrant was simply the start of a new and moving chapter my father’s life.

I knew my father desperately wanted to have his story published. He had told me so years before he had succumbed to dementia and finally died in 2018. But when I started reading, my eyes kind of glazed over. It was truly amazing that he had remembered every detail, but writing down everything just as he remembered it did not always make for easy reading. Did I really want to know exactly how many porcelain figurines his mother had on the mantle? What the feet of the bathtub looked like? What sweater he was wearing one cold Spring day in 1934?

Well, it turned out that I did. Without those lush details, those brilliant colors, the minutia of his memories, I could never have brought my father’s story to life in a way that was authentic. I am certain that I know exactly what his apartment on Schillerstrasse looked like. Ultimately, I decided to rewrite almost every word, but occasionally my father’s descriptions were so beautiful, so perfect, so real, that I left them just as he had written them.

AMERICAN WOLF is entirely his story. So, even though I have written most of his story, it is in my father’s voice, in the first person, just as he would have told it.