TOBY PRESS PUBLISHES NEW FICTION COLLECTION BY WINNER OF PEN/UNESCO AWARD

John Auerbach's Tales of Grabowski to be Released in June 2003

"He has that gift of being able to communicate instantly with those whose antennae are prepared to receive rare frequencies." - Saul Bellow

"There is a strong beauty in Auerbach's style, a delicate irony which shifts imperceptibly into intense wrenching anguish." - Ha'aretz

"An artist of sharp and intense vision." - The Jerusalem Post

David Gordon is a young Jew fighting in the Polish army against the Nazi invasion in 1939. Forced into the ghetto with all the Jews of Warsaw he is witness to acts of increasing brutality as the Nazis begin liquidating the ghetto. Trying to decide what he should do, he realizes that he must escape from the ghetto; not in an attempt to survive, but with the only worthy purpose left - to fight Nazi evil. In order to fight the evil, he must truly kill his Jewish self, destroy his old thoughts, emotions, memories, ideals - and become the man on his new identity card: Wladyslaw Grabowski. Grabowski escapes and becomes a stoker in the German marines. Secure in his new identity as a Polish gentile, he could sit out the war in relative comfort, yet whenever that option tempts him, the ghost of his dead self, the Jew, haunts him, reminding him of what he was created to do. TALES OF GRABOWSKI (Toby Press, June 2003, $19.95) comprises two novellas, Transformations and Escape, and several short stories, which follow Grabowski through life in Nazi Europe. All involvements - with strangers, friends, co-workers, soldiers, spies - are fraught with peril, bringing him ever closer to the thin line that separates life and death. Drawing on deeply personal experiences - for it is the story of Auerbach's own survival - TALES OF GRABOWSKI is a haunting, mesmerizing accomplishment; an undiscovered masterpiece of twentieth century writing.

John Auerbach was born in Warsaw in 1922. During the Second World War, he escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and worked on German ships as a stoker under a false identity. He served in the Israeli Merchant Marines until the death of his son in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when he left his life at sea and returned to living on a kibbutz. There he wrote and published twelve books of short stories and novellas. Auerbach received first prize in the first PEN/UNESCO Awards in 1993. He died in 2002.