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When reviewers or interested people write me why they will not review my book, I have noticed in some instances that the two stories they do like are what I call “Ann Frank” efforts; that is, they are safe, gives humanity a free pass and play on the cello strings of the human heart. I felt them at the time and I wrote what I felt. Most of my 27 stories offer  idiosyncratic points of view, gritty, graphic, savage, caustic, satirical, and stories that take no prisoners. When the head of a Jewish studies program writes me that she “shuddered” upon reading my…

LEATHERBOUNDPOUNDS February 3, 2015 I Truly Lament by Mathias B. Freese By leatherboundpounds Imagine agony is in the rendering. Feel what I have to say and don’t be indifferent. In the preface to his collection of short stories on the Holocaust Mathias B. Freese says it is a story that no-one could ever tell in entirety. He describes it as a “ghastly grandiosity”. It is too large, too devastating, it goes beyond all understanding and adds up to one heaving firestorm in the history of humanity. But somehow, taking a selection of different experiences and giving them a minute, poetic, imaginative treatment, he then…

If the murder of millions is something we must become numb to, in order to persevere, then I disagree. It is as if memory must be dismissed for present life and living. Need it be? Granted, I do not think about a serf in twelfth-century France. Perhaps I should, but I don’t. Our species itself has a short attention span. Indeed, why do we practice the art and science of psychotherapy, for example? It is not to put things behind us as much as to bring them forth, to evoke experience. Real therapy, healing, is a question asked of the…

 Raison d’Être Can you reconstruct the creative process that led you to write The i Tetralogy? i wrote itself. i was written in white heat over a two-week period; it was as if I were channeling my unconscious. I believe that this first of four books on the Holocaust simmered and percolated inside me, away from consciousness, for about four decades. At twenty I read the confession of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoess, who was required to write it prior to his hanging in 1947. A riveting book, perplexing and reptilian in its fascination, here was a man who…