According to the author, Mathias B. Freese ...
An astute historian of the Holocaust observed that it is much like a train wreck, survivors wandering about in a daze, sense and understanding, for the moment, absent. No comprehensive rational order in sight.
I Truly Lament—Working Through the Holocaust is a varied collection of stories: inmates in death camps; survivors of these camps; disenchanted Golems complaining about their designated rounds; Holocaust deniers and their ravings; collectors of Hitler curiosa (only recently a few linens from Hitler’s bedroom suite went up for sale!); an imagined interview with Eva Braun during her last days in the Berlin bunker; a Nazi camp doctor subtly denying his complicity; and the love story of a Hungarian cantor, among others.
A description meant to entice booksellers, librarians, reviewers and readers might be this: A weirdly wonderful short story collection exploring the Holocaust from diverse perspectives in literary styles ranging from gothic and romantic to phantasmagoric.
Moreover, this book in manuscript form was chosen as one of three finalists in the 2012 Leapfrog Fiction Contest. It was selected from out of 424 manuscripts.
My most recent work is This Mobius Strip of Ifs, a collection of essays, and the winner of the 2012 National Indie Excellence Book Award for autobiography/memoirs, nonfiction as well as one of five finalists for the same category, Global Ebooks Awards.
Author of The i Tetralogy (Wheatmark, 2006), a Holocaust novel, winner of the Allbooks Review Editor’s Choice Award 2007, and Down to a Sunless Sea (Wheatmark, 2007), a collection of short fiction, Indie Excellence Finalist Book Awards, I am a retired psychotherapist and teacher.
