About this book: Who is this small being on the street of the East German city of Chemnitz; this unfinished creature and mere larva child? In the first part of her book, Gabriella Mautner paints a picture of Jewish life in the 20's and 30's. Then comes the frightening year 1933. "Once in exile your childhood is over. Even if you are free of the iron prison which Chemnitz meant for us at the end. The exile robs you of your friends, your laughter, your joy. All at once you have aged through the pain of separation and the wounds of uprootedness." In 1998 Gabriella Mautner was invited to return to Chemnitz. The second part of this book deals with meetings of some of its citizens and the quest of reconciliation.
I was born in Chemnitz, Germany and spent my childhood there. At the onset of the Nazi regime, my family being Jewish, we moved to Italy, where I spent my early adolescence. When Italy later became unsafe, we found refuge in Holland. In 1942, disobeying a German command to leave for a concentration camp, we fled through the maze of Nazi-occupied Belgium and France, finally reaching safety in Switzerland. We arrived in the United States in 1946. During my adolescence, I wrote poetry and a novel in German, then stories in Italian -- all lost during the chaos of the war. When I began writing in English, it was my fifth language. My first novel, Out of a Season, was published in 1968 by Thomas Y. Crowell, New York. It was followed by Lovers and Fugitives, published by Mercury House, San Francisco, in 1986. The New York Times, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications, reviewed both novels very favorably. Replica Books republished them in hardcover and paperback in 2000. In 1986, I was a writer in residence at the Djerassi Foundation near Woodside, California. In 1993, my short story, Water Lilies, won a competition and was published in London by the international weekly paper, The European. In 1998, following an invitation from the mayor of Chemnitz, I spent two weeks there, later writing a work of creative non-fiction, titled The Good Place. Its first part is a memoir of childhood, the second a depiction of various encounters with the city's inhabitants and a quest for reconciliation. After I translated it into German, it was published in Germany in 2004 and later serialized by the largest newspaper in the province of Saxony. In 2006, Replica Books published the original English version. Scenes from an unpublished novel, Kindred Spirits, set in San Francisco, won a grant from the Marin County Arts Council. In 2008, I received the prestigious Milley Award for Creative Achievement in the Literary Arts from the Mill Valley Art Commission, in Marin County. I received a Bachelor and Master's degree in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, taught creative writing at the College of Marin and San Francisco State University, and have been on the faculty of the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco, since 1982.
