And Come to Dust
Published 50 Years After It Was Written
Two leading national publishing companies were seriously interested in the manuscript at mid-centry, 1950-51. When eventually decisions were made not to publish, I placed the manuscript in a drawer, got on with life. Decades devoted to family, professional work in the visual arts, free-lance writing and publication of other books, children and grandchildren, travels, nurtured rich experiences with little opportunity or desire to look back.
But soldering a war never leaves its veterans. Now, at age 75, I revisit the manuscript. It is a young man's book, one -- regardless of how long years have changed the man who wrote it -- I consider true and don't want to revise. Leave it as written so soon after the end of the most searing and significant days of our 20th Century. (Drew Bacigalupa, Santa Fe 1999)
A love story set in the final months of World War II. Against the backdrop of bombed, skeletal towns and cities within Germany, American GIs battlle not only the tenacious enemy but personal demons, despair and the descent into madness. Defying military regulations which prohibit fraternization, Drake woos and wins fraulein Klara, a deserter from the Wehrmacht. Drake's comrade-in-arms Tapani, an American soldier of Italian/Jewish origin, struggles with his friend's embrace of a German girl, and with his own dilemma of racial identity and Nazi atrocities. The destines of these three very young people are irrevocably -- shockingly-- determined amid the ravaged ruins of a Rhineland city during the final days of the war. Moving between military sites in Belgium and Germany, the story introduces many of Drake's and Trapani's comrades -- most in their late teens or early twenties -- from their anti-aircraft battalion. It is a tale of Boys at War, and of the grievous psychic wounds which force them to become Men or destroy them. The author completed this book in 1950 while a veteran with fresh memories of the war in Europe.
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© 1997 drewbaci@santafe-newmexico.com
