Saul Braun
MAY 15th ’20 • ISBN: 978-1-887276-93-1 • $ 17.95
DEJA VU OR EXP0SE ?
In 1930, in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, a period of experimentation in democratic government and workers’ rights, as well as various forms of sexual liberation, it was still possible for upper-class hostess Ilse Webber to invite a Social-Democrat union organizer named Mendelsohn, a Jewish banker named Weiss and a pro-Nazi intellectual librarian named Vogel to the same gathering.
However, those days were coming to an end. It was a time of turmoil, with stormtroopers of the Sturmableitung, the brownshirts, creating disorder and mayhem on a daily basis.
Fast forward to 2020, USA: Is it really necessary to declare the obvious?: We must never forget the massacre that took place on June 17th, 2015 at Emanuel AME Church when a hate- lled neo-Nazi armed with a Glock killed nine people at a Bible Study class. Or, the torch-bearing and hate-chanting Charlottesville marchers shouting “Jews will never replace us!” and other slogans like “Blood and Soil!” borrowed verbatim from Nazi Sturmableitung (Storm) Troopers marauding through Berlin streets in the 1930s. This book describes the descent of a society sliding step by step into totalitarianism. What we are experiencing now.
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Saul Braun, 88 years old and displaying a resurgence of creative energy, is a graduate of Yale College class of ’53. A number of his articles have appeared in Esquire, Playboy and for the New York Times Sunday Magazine cover, and has had several WW 2 non- fiction books published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
He was motivated to write this novel, his first, by a concern for the rise of native Fascist elements in our society and also by a powerful memory from his childhood: at some point in the later years of the 1930s, his father received a telegram notifying him his entire Czech Jewish family still then living in Czechoslovakia, numbering in the dozens, had been murdered in Auschwitz
Braun has never forgotten, at the age of 8 or 9, confronting the powerful image of his otherwise stoic father weeping copiously and sitting shiva for the innocents of his lineage slaughtered in the Holocaust. Braun is an only son, but he has four sons and two fully grown grandsons. He figures he has done his part.
Saul Braun today (2020)
