Fugitive Causes

Assembled here for the first time is a selection of "fugitive causes" pursued by the author through some thirty years of life. We hear many voices, but in and through them all speaks the voice of the immigrant haunted by his origins who keeps a precarious peace with his mother tongue. Born in Germany in 1935, he grew up in the war and its aftermath. In poems, short stories, essays, and translations, he pursues his themes to their roots in the years under Hitler. He shows us the boy in the Jungvolk and the man whose academic career did not survive the sixties. He shows us the ordinary Nazis emerging from the ruins in defeat, incapable of remorse, denying their former beliefs and espousing the lie of never having known, never taken part in any of the evil done in their name, the lie of having been the true victims of that evil, miraculously saved by a merciful God. He shows us what he can only imagine of those who suffered at their hands, invoking faith and hope to render what sorrow holds out as promise.