Life's Journey of a Refugee
is a unique voyage from the cauldron of early 20th-century ethnic cleansing to the melting-pot of the mid-century American Dream, from the wrong side of World War II through the gang wars of 1950's Brooklyn and the triumph and tragedies of postwar America.
For six hundred years the Catholic Land of Gottschee has endured as a remote outpost of the House of Austria, the outermost point of the Holy Roman Empire, a "linguistic Island" of medieval German in present-day Slovenia. It has withstood the Bosnian Warlord and Napoleon, but German catastrophe in World War I brings tension with the local Slavs to a simmer, hastening the exodus of educated Gottscheers.
Edwin Stalzer, the author, is born at the boiling point, the moment of Gottschee's final tragedy.
takes you through his life in an Austrian refugee camp from 1945 to 1952, his escape to America, and his triumphant battle for the "American Dream".