Harry Jahal’s Interview with the Author

“No one who seriously encounters the Holocaust is ever done with it. I TRULY LAMENT is a varied collection of stories, inmates in death camps, survivors of these camps, disenchanted Golems complaining about their tasks, Holocaust deniers and their ravings, and collectors of Hitler curiosa (only recently a few linens from Hitler’s bedroom suite went up for sale!) as well as an imagined interview with Eva Braun during her last days in the bunker. The intent is to perceive the Holocaust from several points of view.
An astute historian of the Holocaust has observed that it is much like a train wreck, survivors wandering about in a daze, sense and understanding, for the moment absent. No comprehensive rational order in sight.
To have survived the Holocaust is to have been gutted as a human being. The inner self is ravished. Whether or not one recovers from that is beyond comprehension.
All literary depictions of the Holocaust end as failures, perhaps revealing shards of understanding. And is understanding ever enough?

Writing about the Holocaust is a ghastly grandiosity. The enduring mystery of the Holocaust is that memory must metabolize it endlessly and so we must try to describe it, for it goes beyond unimaginable boundaries. one soon realizes the fundamental understanding that the species is wildly damaged, for only a damaged species could have committed the Holocaust.

By name and nomenclature, the Holocaust is but an approximation of what happened. The species cannot grasp its nature. The artist will only succeed marginally if he or she manages to drive that home.
The eternal perseveration of the species has become the Holocaust. We will never be done with it. We will never work it through.”
What was inspiration behind the characters that you wrote in the book ? Any real life people that have shades in them ?

“It was not based on individuals I know or did know. Given all the reading and reflection about the Holocaust, I left it entirely to my imagination, which is a good one, to create real characters. I wrote to describe or explain the pain of the Holocaust with whatever skills I had.”
How fascinating was the journey of writing this book ?

“An aspect of myself is not to please others but that while I write I share my experience with you, with me first. I have enriched my literary journey, not the other way around. I give to my writing and I learn in that way to write better. Krishnamurti famously said in one of his dialogues, “The word is not the thing itself.” So all my writing is just an approximation of what turmoil, tumult and insight I have about my human condition. As we all should know, to cite Christopher Hitchens, we are only partially rational, animal and often savage at that, and out human genome controls the robot that we are.”

Is the Plot of book somewhere inspired from any incident or things around ?

“THE I TETRALOGY, my extensive take on the Holocaust, represented much of who I am as a Jew and human being, of my growing up Jewish in America, In that novel as well as in I TRULY LAMENT I put all the skills, imagination and heartfelt renderings I could about man. I have gone beyond Wiesel’s affirmation that indifference is not tolerable any longer. I have arrived at a different assessment based on my reading, psychotherapeutic experience, my atheism — free of religious conditioning, the bane of civilization, and I have wandered into the unexplored country. man is out of control, always has been, genetically so!

Consequently writing about the Holocaust in these recent short stories allowed me to examine the nature of man so genetically far beyond Hobbes’s “short, nasty and brutish” assessment.”

Your Writing process involves any research work in media or is it totally based on imagination and experiences from life ?

“I’d pose your question another way. What can I do to become aware, and what can I do to decondition myself so that I can see clearly? In that is hope.”

Tell us a bit biographical journey of yours ? How did you became an author ?

“I wrote to express myself; it took me thirty years to publish a book of short stories that I self-promised that I would do so; I am the tortoise to the hare. I don’t quit and I have significant drives to my personality. Writing served throughout my young adulthood to explain myself to myself, a worthy effort and it goes far to explain why I am not beholden to the crowd or the latest fashion in writing.”

How different are you from your characters in the Books and stories you write ?

“I am everything in this recent collection of stories down to each period, semi-colon and punctuation. How could it be otherwise for any writer? I am not, nor will I ever separate out from what I say or write, for to do so is to abandon whatever integrity one has.”

Was this book originally planned or did it came to your mind while working on another project of yours ?

“Like all my work, it was ready unconsciously and so I just began to write and write. In one year I was able to get nine short stories published, which is unheard at least for me. Turn it around: I am the psychological and emotional template for whatever emerges from whatever and whomever I am, till the day I die.”

Anything that you would like to tell us about yourself or your book that we missed ?

“We are all born to be done away with, and in a sense we are all “near-death” experiences. I associate to Epicurus: “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind.” My writing experience can be extracted in a sense from Kazantzakis’s epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.””

Any advice for new writers ?

“Advice sucks. Whatever advice I have received I had to process through my own machinery. So if you want to lick at the waters of advice-givers, make sure that your machinery is working real well and that you can discern good from bad. Break all the rules. Trust your unconscious, that which really writes your books.”

Will you dabble in other writing styles and what would it be ?

“Most of my work is grounded in the nitty-gritty of everyday life as well as the surreal fantasies I imagine. The thread that runs through all my work is my willingness not to censor my self, and a line from one of my essays says it all: “Fearlessness makes for authenticity in writing.” I try not to pull my punches.”

Where can readers Buy your Books ?

“From the author, mthsfreese@hotmail.com; Amazon.com; Wheatmark.com”