KALEIDOSCOPE - A Novel (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781950134564)

Laurie Rosensohn's wealthy parents believe the illness of fascism can be cured by a "green poultice" - money. Not so Laurie, who believes it can only be stopped by fighting on the front lines. She enlists in the international brigades, changes her name, and moves to Spain, where she witnesses the demise of the Republic, and engages in a tumultuous, but ultimately doomed love affair. Returning to the Big Apple, it takes two weeks before she despairs of her future life: being crushed to death by a parlorful of huge-breasted aunts wearing diamonds the size of your fist, an overstuffed apartment with a twittering canary, and the requisite 2.4 miniature Lauries or Harvard-educated Jewish Wall Street lawyers. She is recruited by the fledgling O.S.S., from which she can fight Hitler's Nazis in the trenches themselves.

Sent to a tiny parish in the backwater of France, Pastor Andre Trocme will be the guiding spirit who foments the rescue and sanctuary of over 5,000 Jews. Jewish-Polish army officer, Stefan Varga, who witnesses the death of his wife, his son, and his country under the jackboots of the Third Reich, will play a larger-than-life role in the Resistance. Liliana Traube, a first magnitude superstar on the prewar Vienna stage, ultimately survives a situation more ghastly and horrifying than even the hellish ovens of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Welcome to KALEIDOSCOPE, Hugo Gerstl's latest epic novel, which celebrates the smallest of extraordinary achievements by single human beings, whose individual efforts are no greater than a grain of sand on the beach, but whose collective efforts make up the entire beach, and change history. From time out of mind, humankind has been motivated by three inescapable elements: Love, War, and the Wisdom learned through our experiences that alters the way we look at life and changes us in one way or another, hopefully for the better. There's an important lesson to be learned from the cataclysmic times in which KALEIDOSCOPE take place: Change does not come when one sees the light; change comes when one no longer wants to live in the darkness.