Survivor Without a Tattoo

Theodore Karpstein was born in the shadow of World War II and was not allowed to move out of that shadow. His family filled his mind with stories of death and destruction that cover a century or more of their own history and that of their distant relatives. Tales of injustice, of revolution, of pogroms, and of the holocaust become his bedtime narratives.

Karpstein wants to be the hero of the stories he hears—and to revenge the wrongs he hears about. In his mind he is both hero and avenger. His own experiences merge with and reinforce the accounts that have filled his mind from a young age.

After a series of misfortunes push Karpstein into a period of homelessness he finds a hiding place in a mysterious and possibly haunted building. The building, with its many forgotten rooms and passageways becomes a character in Karpstein’s saga of self-imposed exile. Karpstein’s solitary life in hiding sets free all the demons that filled his imagination. He is surrounded by them in descriptions that use the literary technique of Magic Realism to engage the reader in the main character’s hallucinations.

Theodore Karpstein is part of a forgotten generation who suffered psychological wounds although they were far from the actual horrors of the holocaust. They are a forgotten generation. They are marked with survivor guilt for the tragic deaths of people they never met.