Delphinium Books

Offering readers the best in quality literature

  • Home
  • About
  • Our Books
  • Blog
  • Submissions
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

The Kaminsky Cure

April 11, 2016

thekaminskycure

Well here I am at five and three-quarters

It’s Christmas 1939 in a little Austrian village that’s now part of Hitler’s Third Reich and I’m just beginning to notice things. Like what my brother and sisters are about and why my parents are often crying and my father usually shouting when he isn’t crying. I think it has something to do with the war we’re fighting, which according to the wireless is due to The International Jewish Conspiracy, whatever that is. But that’s not all. I don’t know it yet, but I was born at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
Not that it wasn’t quite an achievement getting me born at all. I arrived too early, presented myself the wrong way round (Was I trying to climb back inside? You couldn’t blame me), there was no doctor, and the midwife had to yank me out like a cork from a bottle. No wonder I protested. No wonder my mother never had another child, either—both of us had had enough. But anyway there I was, a pint-sized runt, the last of the litter, and that’s how I’ve stayed.

Achievement or not though, you could say my getting born, or conceived for that matter, was really a big mistake. First of all there’s the as yet unraised question of my paternity. (Paternity’s going to be a favorite topic in my family.) And then there’s the undoubted fact, though I don’t know that yet either, that my mother Gabi is a Jew (she converted to Christianity in her teens), while my very Aryan father Willibald Brinkmann—if he is my father—is a Lutheran pastor who has a sneaking admiration for Hitler. (Many Lutheran pastors have, and for some of them it isn’t sneaking, either—they’re openly trying to prove that Jesus wasn’t really a Jew.) On top of that they don’t like each other anyway.

For all these reasons they each wish they weren’t married to who they are. But separation is just about unthinkable. For one thing, marriage is supposed to be a sacred union for Lutheran clergymen. For another, the only thing that can protect my mother and possibly us children is that she’s married to an Aryan. And Willibald’s admiration for the little corporal doesn’t extend so far that he’d actually throw us to the Nazi wolves.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Austria, fiction, half-Aryan, holocaust, Luthern, Nazis, Third Reich, war fiction, World War II

Recent Posts

  • Sleeping With Women [excerpt] from THE GRETA GARBO HOME FOR WAYWARD BOYS AND GIRLS by Steven Gaines August 20, 2024
  • EXCERPT: Animals of the Alpine Front—new historical fiction from Don Zancanella [August 20, 2024] August 5, 2024
  • On Writing ORIANA by Anastasia Rubis February 28, 2024
  • “First Loves” (excerpt) from MY LIFE AT THE WHEEL by Lynne Sharon Schwartz December 11, 2023
  • Started as a Text: The Writing Process by Bill Gaythwaite September 28, 2023
  • The Fact and the Truth of THE LIGHT OF SEVEN DAYS by River Adams August 8, 2023

Categories

  • Delphinium Authors
  • General
  • New Books
  • News

Tags

1954 acceptance speech artists Austria autobiographical Books Booz Allen Hamilton bottoming out celebrity demotic Dostoyevsky dysfunctional Edward Snowden fame fiction fiction-writing Fitgerald Fuhrer George Elliot Germany Hemingway Historical Fiction holocaust imagination James Frey Jewish Karen Silkwood literature Memoir memoirist Middlemarch Nabokov Nazi Nazis Nobel Prize novelist novelists NSA Reading redemption Sobibor style World War II writers writing

Archives

  • August 2024
  • February 2024
  • December 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • December 2022
  • August 2022
  • April 2022
  • October 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2019
  • April 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • August 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • October 2013

© 2025 · Delphinium Books. All rights reserved.