The Wanderer from Czernowitz
A Memoir
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
"My adventures as a newly minted soldier started with my being issued a Soviet soldier’s uniform and a fully loaded gun with a drum magazine. I was ordered to stand guard outside a house which was directly opposite the school of architecture where my father had been a professor. In the early hours when I was tired from standing all night a Soviet sergeant appeared, ripped the gun off my shoulder, and bellowed that I endangered the regiment by allowing myself to be disarmed so easily. It turned out it was just a test to see how alert I still was after a night on my feet. They did not discharge me..."
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
In The Wanderer from Czernowitz, Otto Appenzeller tells the story of a remarkable life that spanned many of the convulsions of the 20th century, including war, genocide, and displacement, and finally brought him to a happier place: the American southwest. There he fused his loves of science, endurance sports, and high mountains.
About the Author
Otto Appenzeller was born in a vanished world, the German-speaking Central Europe that endured between the world wars. He grew up Jewish in Czernowitz, a former Austrian regional capital that found itself first in Romania, then in the Soviet Union. By the time he was 18 he had survived fascism, antisemitism, and military service in the Second World War. Then he wandered--to Prague, to Australia, to the UK, and finally to America, where he raised his family and pursued his diverse interests as a medical researcher--interests that took him around the world, and to some of its highest mountains.