Lucky To Be Here

About the Book

Lucky To Be Here recounts the absurdity, sadness and delight of a Jewish family’s life in America during the turbulent years of World War II. In Toledo, Ohio, Werner Auerbach’s impressions of his new surroundings and his “Americanization” are related alternately through the boy’s diary and the narrator’s commentary.

Uprooted by the Nazi terror from comfortable circumstances in Cologne, Germany, the family strives to blend into the environment of provincial America of the 1940s. Eight-year-old Werner and his younger sister Caroline maintain a close bond, as their parents, Gustav and Edith, struggle to rebuild their lives.

Past and present are fused while memory functions as the “substance of life,” forming a basis for the continuity of existence. Gliding by the windows of the family car, silos, farms and fields of rural Ohio take on a surrealistic quality. In the background, “lost” relatives in Europe and sinister plans of the German-American Bund contrast with Werner’s activities. A transatlantic journey in the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic, Saturday movies, national holidays, comic books, violin instruction, Hebrew lessons, apple pie, and a paper route are interwoven with images evoked by Edith’s box of photographs, a fragile testimony of their former life.

About the Author

Herbert L. Kaufman’s multi-faceted career has included positions as professor of German language and literature at Queens College (New York), visiting professor of American Studies at Kiel University (Germany), violinist with the Alabama Symphony, and adjunct professor of music history in Antwerp University’s European Studies Program (Belgium). From 1980 to 1997, he was a violinist with the Flemish Opera in Antwerp and Ghent. In 1994, Kaufman’s play Pals won First Prize in the 25th Anniversary Playwriting Competition of the American Theatre Company in Brussels, and was produced by the ATC that same year. In 1995, Kaufman’s radio play Last Supper received the BBC’s Best Play from Europe award, and was produced and broadcast by BBC World Service Drama. Last Supper has also been published by the BBC in its anthology Radio Plays for the World. More recent works include Pebbles on the Stone, an espionage novel published in 2002 by Xlibris; and Lifelines, a Holocaust drama that was produced in Antwerp, Belgium in October 2002 by the British American Theatrical Society.