Larry Duberstein's Blog
February 8, 2016
A Truly Wonderful Read
by Sheila Deethe
A wall separates Carl Barry from the people around him. It’s an invisible wall keeping the street’s grit and dirt on its other side, while revealing only the surface of the man. And it’s a wall that began in the hurts of World War II, in the peace of a private swimming place, and in the ceaseless death that hid behind gray smoke.
Larry Duberstein’s Five Bullets intertwines the stories of a young Jew from Prague and a successful but very private structural engineer in New York. But Karel Bondy and Carl Barry are the same, and passing years and pages reveal a story of tragedy and love, persistence and peril, all touched with truth to self and faithless hope.
Sweet romance, gentle humor, dialog that convinces completely, wonderful characters with space to grow from childhood to adulthood—though not all will be given the time—and a central tragedy like the elevator shaft of one of Carl’s unloved buildings; it all comes together in a tale that spans war, Holocaust, man’s cruelty to man, and the love that binds and unites us.
By the end of this novel, you too might look with damp eyes, wondering “if these were joyful tears for their love or tragic tears for all [you’ve] pretended not to know,” or maybe even tears for the randomness of it all.
Five Bullets brings to life the harrowing deaths of uncountable Jews, and the wounded futures of survivors. It holds loves and griefs of many kinds in glorious balance, makes history real, and allows the reader to see behind that wall, to the truth of true lives. It’s a truly wonderful read.
Disclosure: I was given a free copy and I offer my honest review.
November 24, 2015
Author Readings
No readings are currently scheduled for the remainder of 2015.
To arrange readings for your bookclub, class, bookstore, or other group, please e-mail: lee@brimstonecornerpress.com
March 12, 2015
Facing History and Myself: A Conversation with My Father
by Annie Brown
By all accounts, my father is a brilliant writer with nine books under his belt. Despite this, I’ve somewhat avoided reading his books–finding it a little strange to discover our family revealed in print, even wrapped in the protective cloak of fiction. Despite his work’s critical acclaim, I have only read a handful of his books. When his most recent book, Five Bullets, was released, he mailed me a copy with the inscription: “Time to face a bit of history, world and family all at once.” This book was not exactly fiction; it was based on my dad’s uncle’s experience during the Holocaust.
From my childhood, I have vivid memories of my Great Uncle Martin and, his wife, my Aunt Flora. He was a wizened and stoic man who generously put us up in his Lincoln Center brownstone apartment when we visited New York. My strongest memory is of him getting in his oversized American car, a Cadillac or an Oldsmobile, and seeing the whole steering column come booming down to his level, enabling him to peer over the dashboard as he drove us into Manhattan from Long Island. When I was young, I had no idea that his wife and children had been murdered in Auschwitz. I had no idea that he had escaped the concentration camp and fought with partisans in the woods of Poland. It can be mind-blowing when we realize how much we don’t know.
Over the recent Winter Break, I devoured the 200 page novel. It was a fast read with accessible language. Because it was a mix of fact and fiction, I was excited to speak with my father to hear more about the book and why he wrote it. I asked him to talk about the book and—like the writer that he is—he penned me an answer. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.
"Yes, he was a small man in a big car by the time you knew him. But much earlier, he was a powerful presence and to me a fascinating figure, because like you I was always taken with history. The War and the Holocaust were not very far back in the rear view mirror when I was a kid and here was this man who had been in the middle of it all. I would never have written the book if not for him. It was the only such story I have ever felt entitled to tell. I would not presume to so closely examine the life of a survivor on the basis of no more than my interest, my imagination, and research. One could write such a book, obviously, and I would never argue against any work of pure imagination, but personally I would not have felt the calling. Whereas Martin’s deep reluctance toward telling it himself, combined with the basic elements that I managed to worm out of him over the years, made it not only possible for me to take it on; it made it imperative. No one else was going to do the job."
As teachers, we know that the Holocaust is a powerful topic for our students and there is a rich body of literature already out there ranging from Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night (Facing History has a great study guide for Night.) to the children’s novel The Book Thief that was made into a movie recently . I asked my father what he was hoping to add to this body of literature and what he would you say to a critic who argued that the Holocaust has already “been done”.
"There are at least two answers to the question of what I would hope to add. The first is simply one more story, one man’s story—because to a critic who says the Holocaust has been “done”, I would say, with the Shoah Project, that it hasn’t been done until every actor has told his or her story. My conviction is that every story is worth having, and this was the story which happened to be entrusted to me.
The second answer is that while Five Bullets was rigorously researched and adheres religiously to historical fact, it is not a history, or a memoir, it is a novel. And though some might say that makes it less worthwhile, or less real, as an addition to the literature of the Holocaust, I would argue the opposite, that fiction can often do as much or more to define, distill, and deepen the experiences being addressed. To my way of thinking, fiction can be reality heightened. Hopefully, this novel achieves a measure of success at doing that, bringing home not just important information but also the complex emotions, the back-stories and the human aftermaths."
Working with Facing History, I have heard many survivors speak and tell their stories, but for most, there was a reluctance to talk about what happened. Several years ago I had the pleasure of speaking with a survivor in her mid-eighties who was a young teen during the Holocaust. She revealed to me that she said nothing for over forty years and she never even told her son. Her son only discovered her past when she was asked to speak publicly and share her stories with school-children. She told me she didn’t want him to feel bad for her and she didn’t want to burden him. Generally though, the act of telling the story seems cathartic for survivors that do speak. I was curious to learn how open Uncle Martin was to talking about his past.
"The reluctance you cite is and has been very real, and goes a way toward explaining why this book had to be fiction. It’s also true that fiction is what I write. But if I were to simply pass along everything my uncle told me in so many words about his experiences, the book would have been a 10-page article, or maybe 20. This man could easily have gone through life without speaking one syllable about the nightmare he lived through and the losses he suffered. The first information I wrenched from him came when I was 8 or so and bugged him to explain the numbers tattooed on his arm.
Then there were bits and pieces—I was a persistent cross-examiner. But it wasn’t until the day I graduated from college that he told me the story of his “retreat” after the war to the village I call Borva in the novel. And it was decades later before he yielded up the gripping event that gives the book its title. I learned as much as I learned only because my desire to know it was as mighty as his desire to withhold it.
Sadly there was no catharsis for him, no pathway to it. When he related to me the incident of the five bullets, his teeth were gritted as fiercely as if it had happened five minutes ago rather than 50 years. For me, writing the book was somewhat cathartic, though of course the burden I carried was nothing against the burden he carried. Simply put, the Holocaust was foremost among those historical events that engaged me, enraged me."
This idea of being enraged by history intrigues me because it shows such a personal connection to the past to which, as a History teacher, I am somewhat numbed. To my father, who was born in 1944, the Holocaust happened in his lifetime and it affected his loved ones. Even though the book was based on stories from my Uncle, I knew my father had done a lot of research by reading and even travelling to eastern Europe, so I asked him to talk about the role of research in writing fiction.
Read the rest of Annie’s interview with her father next week.
Annie Brown works as a high school humanities teacher, coach for new teachers and curriculum developer. Annie is a current member of the Los Angeles Facing History Teacher Leadership Team and writes frequently on topics in education.
March 10, 2015
MARCH 23 2015, AUTHOR READING
Larry Duberstein reading from and signing his new novel Five Bullets:
Monday, March 23, 1-2 p.m.
Temple Beth Elohim, 10 Bethel Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts
LLAIC Lunchtime Speaker Series
Life Long Learners: An Independent Collaborative
Chicago Center for Literature and Photography Reviews
Karel Bondy lives with his family in Prague prior to the onset of the Second World War. He comes from a tight-knit community of Czech Jews. Carl Barry is a wealthy businessman in New York City, overseeing the construction of new skyrises. Carl Barry is Karel Bondy, although this change in identity occurs slowly throughout Larry Duberstein's masterful novel, Five Bullets. After settling in the United States, Carl Barry falls in love with and marries Clara Weiss. She a widow, he a widower. As he becomes closer to Clara, he pals around with her nephew Lewis. Lewis likes to asks questions and Carl enjoys answering them, sometimes with humor and sometimes with answers that are far from truthful. Lewis, ever astute, realizes his uncle is hiding something from him.
Duberstein arranges the novel to follow parallel tracks. In the first track is the pre-war life of Karel Bondy. In the second track is Carl Barry's postwar prosperity. Each track, in its own way, heads towards a collision course. For Karel Bondy, it is Czechoslovakia's sacrifice to Munich and the incremental indignities conceived by the German conquerors. His wife, Mila, retains her optimism, even as conditions worsen. First Jews endure restrictive legislation barring them from certain kinds of jobs and then restrictions become repression and then oppression. As head of the family, Karel keeps his game face on, despite knowing that the German's have far more sinister plans than ghettos and work camps.
Five Bullets is a portrait of the twentieth century. Even after enduring the inhumanity, brutality, and evil that characterized that time period, Karel does his best to retain his humanity. After seeking refuge with a Polish farmer, he leaves to fight with Russian partisans. Unlike the joking and coarse partisans, Karel remains taciturn, cynical, and bitter. When the War finally ends, he decides to settle scores. But we only come to this pivotal scene, when he confronts the SS officer that sent his family to their ultimate extermination, several decades into his new life as Carl Barry. Lewis receives much information from Uncle Carl, seeing him as a font of encyclopedic knowledge. But when it comes to his experiences in the War, it is like pulling teeth.
Then Uncle Carl decides to tell Lewis everything. He decides to tell Lewis the story of the five bullets and how he used them. Five Bullets reads like an intense mashup between Mad Men, Schindler's List, and Titus Andronicus. It is a gut-wrenching story of the Holocaust, an astute portrait of Mid-Century American from the Jewish perspective, and a nail-biting revenge thriller. Duberstein's fiction reveals what we as a species are capable of doing to each other, both on a global, political scale and within the mind of a single individual hellbent on re-balancing the scales, even if that means taking the law into his own hands. Coupling together the immigrant narrative with that of a revenge drama turns a simple story into something more sublime.
-- Karl Wolff
December 18, 2014
Recogniton for Five Bullets
Five Bullets has been named a Notable Book for 2014 by Shelf Unbound.
November 25, 2014
January 22, 2015, Author Reading
Larry Duberstein reading from and signing his new novel Five Bullets:
Thursday, January 22, 2015 at 7 p.m.
Gibson's Bookstore, 45 South Main Street, Concord, NH 03301 - Phone : (603) 224-0562 -- Map
Author Reading, Concord, NH
Larry Duberstein reading from and signing his new novel Five Bullets:
Thursday, January 22, 2015 at 7 p.m.
Gibson's Bookstore, 45 South Main Street, Concord, NH 03301 - Phone : (603) 224-0562 -- Map
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November 10, 2014
Author Reading, Hancock, NH
Larry Duberstein reading from and signing his new novel Five Bullets:
Hancock Public Library, Daniels Room
Thursday, December 4, 2014 at 7 p.m.
Holocaust scholar and National Book Award winning author Theodore Rosengarten calls Five Bullets “a daring, elegant, introspective masterpiece.”
“Haunting as it is compelling, Five Bullets offers an engaging, intelligent meditation on memory, hope, and survival.”—Small Press Reviews
“…a memorable, complex character in a powerful story of war, survival, and healing.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Each vignette of this one man’s two lives is balanced on a foundation of masterful writing.”—Foreword Reviews
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November 6, 2014
Author Reading
Larry Duberstein signing and discussing Five Bullets his latest novel.
Karel Bondy was a young Jewish engineer and father of three living in Prague when the Nazis invaded. An idyllic life ends forever in the Nazi sweep that separates the family in the death camp of Auschwitz. Karel alone escapes.
The Toadstool Bookshop -- Peterborough, NH
Saturday, November 22, 2014 11:00 a.m.
