Inmate 1818 and Other Stories

The release of Inmate 1818 and Other Stories, a collection of twelve short stories inspired by the Holocaust and its aftermath, marks a new milestone for a celebrated writer with unusual skill and vision. The stories of Bernard Otterman, a Holocaust survivor born in Lodz, Poland, are set in the ghettos and camps of World War II and in the difficult days following Hitler's war against the Jews. The Shoah defines the lives of all characters in the stories-survivors as well as their children. In the title story, "Inmate 1818," a young boy is smuggled into a labor camp and befriended by an eccentric teenager with a love for astronomy, who gives the boy a gift that saves his life. In "Golem of Auschwitz," a survivor is haunted by the memory of the golem, a mythical creature drawn from Jewish folklore, that he and a Rabbi's son created while in captivity. A German boy is determined to redeem his family's Nazi sins by recreating the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp using plastic toy bricks in "Lego Lager." In "Days of Rage," married survivors are tormented when their son believes and spouts a neo-Nazi ideology. A survivor in "Lotto Fever" is both upset and obsessed by winning the lottery using numbers very similar to those tattooed on his arm. And in "Black Grass," the author turns to the rich tradition of magical realism to respond to the phenomenon of the Holocaust, where the darkness born by this tragedy slowly envelops the world. Scholars and fans of the work of Franz Kafka, Chaim Grade, Primo Levi, Ida Fink, and Henryk Grynberg will find immediate parallels to Otterman's writing. His poems have been published in Poetry, Jewish Currents and other noted journals while his short stories have appeared in New Millennium Writings and Word/Slovo. Inmate 1818 and Other Stories is…