Category Archives: Blog

I just scanned Sunless, published in 2007 and reread “Echo,” a story about attachment and loss as well as love. It is strange for me to look back upon what I’ve written. Often the sense is who wrote these thoughts. At times I am pleased with the way they have been written. When you add up the amount of stories I’ve written, it amounts to 42, 27 in a book about the Holocaust, the other 15 in Sunless. I began writing short stories because I found them a good way to tell a story with concision. The i Tetralogy was my first novel and it came in at 343 pages. Since then books of essays or memoirs averaged from 125 pages to 200 pages. I am writing less but I hope with greater intensity. NMM may come in about 130 pages. Insecurity settles in with the fear I am running out of steam after eight books. Perhaps.

I am free to do what I want as a scribbler; I write the book. I edit and self-publish the book, and I push it along with some publicity; then I add it to my shelf, an array of accomplishment. I hand out my books to potential mates on eharmony, or possible connections, to friends, to potential friends, as a greeting card which they are. NMM may become an active seller if places of bereavement, rehabs, hospices, mortuaries, et al are informed of its merit. The book is written from an existential and stoical point, god and religion are absent except for my left jabs at the systems. The book is not something Hallmark would merchandise. Essentially the book is one more memoir with a different point of view, but a memoir nevertheless. In my muted arrogance or blatant grandiosity, I feel I have something to say. My self-purpose is to have my say and then get the hell off this Hobbesian planet.

If I didn’t know how to write or to express myself in word, I would mourn like thousands of other men across this spacious country. But I can express myself, and it is not every man who can write about his wife’s loss with a measure of writing skill. For that I am fortunate.  Years ahead, long after I am gone, Nina’s book may be picked up by a reader and offer some insight, some measure of human truth, and a measure of what it is to be mortal man enduring loss. The book itself is saturated with my historic thinking processes, my philosophy, my crankiness about death and dying, my stoicism and existentialism and my anger and at times, rage. Will Durant wrote of “the pertinacity of death.” A great turn of a phrase which I, sensing its worth, set to memory. I struggle with the shadows cast by death on a daily basis. I believe it gives gravitas to what I have written, what I write now. I spend some time considering the scenario that would play out upon my dying and death. It is scary, it is frightening, but I don’t avoid it, I struggle with it and I think how Zorba, close to his death in Zorba the Greek, challenges death himself to come wrestle with him.

I am sure that I will be less brave when the time comes. The thing about words is that you can make them express your better self, your idealizations. I write to explore my self. That is an honorable task for me and I set out to do it every time I come to write. At this very moment an internal cloud is within me and I am struggling to grasp it and then relay it to you in words. It is about what I do and how, I imagine, I go about doing it. I still struggle to articulate what I feel, that amazing transition from thought to word to writing it down. I am losing it, that feeling which distresses me, for I almost had it within my grasp. It is not the words, it is the pulse, the flowered impulse, the growing need to express an inchoate feeling that comes to me and in some way I have to feel it, get it emotionally and then finally write it down. And what I wanted to say was about what makes me write, what internal hormonal flow comes to me and needs to be channeled into words.I think, crudely, it has to do with a need to write, an impulse to express. All of my life, it seems now, at this moment, I have had a need to express myself and I was stymied for years, blocked and dammed up, until I found words. I could not play a musical instrument, nor dance, nor sing, nor reveal athletic prowess. I was a static young man. And that unbelievable frustration ultimately was broken through by chance, randomness, therapy, accident and adversity. It amounted to wanting to come in the heat of lust and passion and not being able to. I wonder of all the others, men and women, broken by the inability to be.

In a few weeks I will submit my final edit of the above book which is an elegy and homage to my deceased wife, Nina. It is a moment of loose ends, checking the cover of the book as well as the back cover spiel by editor, David Herrle, who was also the consulting editor to what is now my eighth book. When all is completed it will go to the publisher’s editor for her final input and then back again to me to read once more and end tinkering with words and punctuation. Hopefully it goes to the printer and sometime in late September it will be published.

By that time I will have consulted with Bobbie Crawford, consultant, of Nurture Your Book, a publicist. We have agreed upon a plan to market the book. I have begun to garner all my literary contacts, past reviewers, friends, connections so that I can market it by myself as well. I will have what they call a sell sheet to email to potential readers. Essentially I just want to collect a few good reviews. I am not that interested in the royalty aspect as I am in having the book read. At this time in my life I am only concerned with sharing, my generativity, to cite Erik Erikson, as a human being. At 79 money means dreck.

I have, on average, written a book every 2 or 3 years. It is this accomplishment that I am proud of, given that I started at 65 on this streak. Recently I had a cinema-photographer interview me for a video geared to You Tube. Part of that taping will be used to advertise my latest book, perhaps no more than 2 or 3 minutes. The experience allowed me to wax about my life, how I came to writing — pain; my low grade depression all through high school; my depressive mother, my nincompoop father; growing up lower middle class poor in housing projects. A sad memory is my parents buying what was essentially porch furniture and my mother buying material to make covers for the chairs and couch; that kind of poor.

Since I am not writing this essay in one sitting, it will wander, and wander is good, wander makes for the unconscious to speak by way of associations. It is 7:01 PM, the sky is darkening, it is warm outside this summer day, now September third. It was this week I dreaded as a teacher, the going back to school, putting on the stern harness of the teacher once again, smelling the new varnish on the gym floors. When I think of all the terms I lived in three decades, I sense the control involved. I felt controlled, the one feeling I have always detested. I have a rebellious streak in me, that part of my passive-aggressive behavior which explodes on rare occasion. I was a very controlled child, my mother accomplishing that with not raising one hand to me; it was a manipulation of the atmosphere surrounding her and me. [See “Mortise and Tenon”in Down to a Sunless Sea discussed below.]Sleep in peace, mom. You did the best you could, although it was not good enough.

The literary conceit of Nina’s Memori Mori is to view myself as an artifact. By writing about myself in relation to Nina, the thought was that I could shed some light upon her. Perhaps, I must admit, it was an avoidance about having to deal directly with the impact of Nina. And it was a subtle narcissism as well, for it is easy to write about myself, literary ham that I am, than it is to compose thoughts and reactions to the significant other. It was a variant on a self-lie; but who cares, for no one is hurt, no one dies, no one is sold into slavery. The elegy was an investigation into who I was, the song of my entire life. I lifted parts and sections of other works, I reconnoitered here and there for literary scraps and set them into formations and marched en masse to the sound of a different drummer. Like a snowball, I used good packing to make it cohere. The reader doesn’t know, the reader doesn’t care. It is first impact that carries the day. I intend to lie to you with all the artifice and skill I have.

My publicist, consulting editor and publisher editor are of the same mind, telling me that this book is probably the best of my “career.” It is flattering to hear all this but I have no career, for I am just a scribbler. An autodidact from day one about fifty years ago, I just began writing. I spent years writing without recognition but out of a need, a drive to express something of myself before I died. Like the cartoon figure of Kilroy that GIs left on tanks and walls across Europe, I am simply saying that I was here, the usual pomposity of the human being.

The classic trouble with being self-taught, the autodidact, it seems to me is that one repeats all the same writing errors that could have been avoided with some instruction. Perhaps the good thing about being an autodidact is that in not knowing the rules, you break the rules; and that reminds me of Welles. He didn’t know the rules of film-making, for he had the skills of a radio man. By breaking the rules, he made newer rules, transcendent ones. I found my voice, my so-called style after many, many revisions, remembering how I worked over a paragraph maybe 20 times in a story and it still was not satisfactory. An editor at the New Yorker encouraged me by saying that, at least, he saw the care I revealed in my writing. I had nothing to really say except a gargled thought of small dimension and I worked it over laboriously thinking that rewriting might lead to something worthwhile. It did not. I produced a mouse. A lapidary does not make a diamond.

I remember taking a self vow. I promised myself that I would publish a book of short stories before I died. Years, years and years later after having a small collection of published stories under my belt, after 30 years! I self-published a collection of short stories, Down to a Sunless Sea. Tracy -Jane Newton, editor, wrote: “Mathias B. Freese has the ability, without mawkishness or sentimentality, to delve into the darkest struggle of life. So many things in this short story collection are resonant of his own troubled youth and his experiences as a clinical social worker, which is evident through his vivid characterizations and adept understanding of the horrors impaired human minds can endure. Due to his stimulating, thought-provoking writing style, one will not be able to resist feeling involved or indeed questioning one’s own morals.” So, I was anointed.

I advocate that the Wernher von Braun Center be renamed. Perhaps call it the Goring Complex, since Braun and Goring were members of the Nazi party. Goring’s Luftwaffe rained down death over Europe and Braun launched over 9,521 Cruise-like missiles to England, beginning on 13 June 1944. Braun’s membership in the Nazi Party is dated 12 November 1937 and his membership number is 5,730,692. If you need to reference this, use Wikipedia for basic facts. Or, if you require a more substantial historical source, any major work on the rise of Nazism will suffice. The English historian Sir Ian Kershaw is a reputable scholar of note on the period.

As a child of the Fifties I dimly recall von Braun with his affable Mr. Rogers panache, Germans label it gemuttlichkeit, on the Dave Garroway show getting all worked up explaining his proposed space station. There is a photo at the time of Disney and Braun, both in good spirits, enthusiasts. Braun was irresistible; that as a rocket scientist he built his V1 andV2 rockets (V for vengeance in German) at a slave labor camp on the Baltic Sea, Peenenunde, is washed over. The great German artist Kiefer has called such things a “conspiracy of silence.” In Operation Paper Clip the American government brought over Nazi scientists (the operative word is Nazi) to advance our rocketry and compete against the Russkies. The Russians took a helping of Nazi scientists as well. All societies, one philosopher has written, are essentially corrupt.

When I ride past the Braun Center on my way to Huntsville and read the bold letters of the center, I feel much like any black person seeing the Confederate flag beating against a post. I feel debased, forgotten, caught in a web of indifference. We speak of Holocaust deniers, yet those of us who are thoughtful and honorable citizens cannot widen their perspective to see that the von Braun Center as named is one consequence of Holocaust denial. Good people desecrate other good people by honoring a Nazi. I will say it for you – it is an abomination.

Indifference and moral sloth sustain Wernher von Braun in the minds of the Huntsville community. I am sure his memory and “good deeds” are reminiscent of Il Duce who made the trains run on time. What he has done for the citizens, fame and fortune, keep him a cherished personage. He is our “good Nazi.” Pick up a brochure in the center and you will find his past expunged or grossly mitigated. We call this collusion. This is the classic – historic – stance of the herd, always has been.

Having read considerably about von Braun and his vicious Nazi brother, Magnus von Braun, a chemical engineer who died peacefully in Arizona, Wernher expressed remarkable obliviousness to the slave workers who he viewed with total indifference. For they were objects in his mind; he was a base opportunist. Making his way to our country with the help of our government, he merchandised his scientific wizardry in a such a way the community absorbed him as one of its own. I suppose you might say he was a good immigrant. Huntsville metabolized him.

When I arrived two years ago to Alabama and observed my first Passover at Temple B’Nai Sholom in Huntsville, I noticed a police car stationed at the front door. Curious, I asked a woman congregant about that. She answered with an ancient tribal shrug which telegraphed 56 centuries of recorded history and I knew what she meant. Given my history, I would have situated Jewish men about the temple. I have less fear as an American Jew –that is why we are here. I also subscribe to the wise adage that if you forget you are a Jew, the world will remind you of it.

And when Easter arrives this year will you have police cars in front of your churches just in case?

My uncle was in the Battle of the Bulge, a sergeant and meted out swift justice to the SS he came across in the last days of the war. Awarded the Bronze Star, he knew who he was. My family has served in WW11 and Korea. And as for the role of Jews in the South, Jews fought for the Confederacy and Jews were in the cabinet of Jefferson Davis. Judah P. Benjamin, a fascinating character, served as both Secretary of State and Secretary of War. Col. Myers, a Jew, was the Quartermaster General of the Confederacy. And at the Nazi march at Charlottesville, I would know who to side with, Mr. President.

The Wernher von Braun Center is offensive to all of us. A toxic reminder of a Nazi who mingled, associated and appreciated Nazism, Alabaman Jews find it repugnant, insufferable, as I do.

In all his books, Elie Wiesel cautions us against indifference as he finds it pernicious and allows such men as von Braun to avoid condemnation, for he is beyond redemption, thousands suffered and died so he could make his tinker toys. Recently I’ve been informed that on his gravesite there is a marker with a biblical quotation that von Braun favored. Yes, to the end, the ever evangelistic and purveyor of things over men and women, goes boldly where no man has ever gone before (Did he know that Shatner and Nimoy were Jews?).

This anecdote of the first English Jewish Prime Minister, Disraeli, might serve as a coda. In Parliament a representative from Ireland rained down anti-Semitic abuse upon Disraeli. Why? No real reason; anti-Semitism is like mold, always in the air. Nevertheless, Disraeli kept still and when the representative had his say, he replied.

“Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of Right Honorable Gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”

Change the name!

March 13, 2018