RI author blends history, fiction in ‘Eavesdropping in Oberammergau’

We met for coffee to discuss her book, its past and its future.  She handed me an advance copy of “Eavesdropping in Oberammergau”: a black and white cover photograph of a cliff and low-lying houses, and a red Gothic letter “O” – a handsome volume categorized as “Fiction/Holocaust.”

We talked about the process of writing, of publishing, of distribution.  Salk hadn’t wanted to mail her book to me, she preferred to rendezvous and to talk about the research and the history of the project.  

“I can understand, and accept, a range of viewpoints about the argument that fiction and World War II shouldn’t mix.  But there is also freedom of expression within our American culture. 

“I have combined much of my Army-brat childhood with my study of the character I name Stefan. His actual biography is that this Munich native, born Jewish, converted to Catholicism in the early Nazi days. 

“Of course, in the Krystallnacht 1938 prelude to the Great Catastrophe, he was [nonetheless] deported to Dachau, but, like some lucky others of that era, he was released. 

“After his Kindertransport sojourn in England, he somehow, for some reason of his own, returned to Germany … and to Oberammergau.”

In this haunted realm in Germany, the renowned, or infamous, “Passion Play” continued to be performed publicly throughout the 1950s, despite protests from Jewish organizations.  The play was, and is, a notorious and inflammatory indictment of Jews for a villainous conspiracy against Jesus.

The story that Hilary Salk has written is

Article source: http://jvhri.org/stories/RI-author-blends-history-fiction-in-Eavesdropping-in-Oberammergau,4955