The Requisitions; or, on The Beauty & Barbarity of the Human Condition
It’s been a while since I’ve written on this space. Three years by my count. That’s mostly because I migrated over to Substack a few years ago, a space where I can express my most authentic self as a novelist and musician.
If I’m returning here today, albeit briefly, it’s for my Medium followers who might not be aware that I’ve just published my second novel, The Requisitions, a historical metafiction set during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Historical Metafiction
Set in both the present day and WWII, The Requisitions is about history, memory, and a novelist writing himself back into the lives of those who once lived.
In The Requisitions, a present-day narrator trying to make sense of his past imagines the story of Viktor, a disillusioned academic forced into the notorious Łódź Ghetto, Elsa, a captive Gestapo secretary, and her estranged fiancé, Carl, a troubled policeman whose fixation with the past is pushing him towards unspeakable cruelty.
Praise for The Requisitions
“Vibrant, shadowed, compelling and ultimately symphonic, The Requisitions offers the gift of love in an impossible situation. What starts in a Polish town in a cafe in 1939 ends in the hearts of readers, everywhere, now. Moving and, as intended, memorable.” — Nor Hall, author of The Moon and The Virgin and Those Women
“‘The taste of transitoriness is on the tongue.’ Something of that surrender, an echo of the medieval woodcut, the sorrowing starkness of Albrecht Durer, haunts this account of a Europe overshadowed by the imminent avalanche of history, a cataclysm its characters feel helpless, even unwilling to avert.”— John Baxter, author of The Most Beautiful Walk in the World
“There is an inherent lyricism throughout this original and ambitious novel. Deeply researched and masterfully constructed, The Requisitions traces the lives of captivating characters and leaves us with a deep sense of having traversed an arduous and unforgettable journey — during World War Two and beyond.”— Heather Hartley, author of Knock Knock and Adult Swim
“Riveting reading. The Requisitions never lets the reader feel the safe distance of history. The result is viscerally uncomfortable — and perhaps this is necessary for the memory of the Holocaust to remain present and real within us.”— Tim Ward, Mature Flâneur, author of Mature Flâneur
“A deeply engaging immersion into two of the hardest questions to answer regarding the Holocaust — namely, why? And how? Masterful prose and plotting, and a unique and imaginative approach, blending personal memoir, historical metafiction, and philosophical inquiry into the deepest recesses of the human soul…sobering, unsettling…but comes out — barely — on the side of a case for hope.”— Janet Hulstrand, author of A Long Way from Iowa
“A roadmap through some of the most dangerous and emotional moments of our time. This page-turning book is a must-read for all those who value the work of a master storyteller in command of his material.”— David A. Andelman, author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today
Kingdom Anywhere Publishing
The Requisitions is published by Kingdom Anywhere, an independent micro-press founded by me and my wife, the photographer Augusta Sagnelli.
Before going global, Kingdom Anywhere published a limited first edition in Paris, France of 300 copies, which sold out in less than six months. I studied historical metafiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA) and Holocaust studies at University College London (MA), where I wrote my dissertation on Auschwitz survivor/psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl’s theory of the “will to meaning.”
To this end, The Requisitions is the culmination of a decade of academic research and a lifelong passion for storytelling. It’s an honor to bring this book out into the world and to share it with you. Readers can now purchase The Requisitions wherever books are sold.
Below you’ll find the opening pages:
a boy at a bookshelf
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night.
— WH Auden, “September 1 1939”
When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café. Professor Viktor Bauman’s clean-shaven face accentuates his smile. Though he’s only a figment of my imagination, he reminds me of myself as a child, sliding the crystal pepper shaker back and forth between his hands atop the white linen tablecloth (today, like yesterday, the waiter has forgotten the salt).
This is when Viktor first sees her, the young woman in the red dress, smiling at him from across the terrace. Her name is Elsa Dietrich — she is of my imagination, too — and she is about to receive some troubling news concerning her estranged fiancé, Carl. I can hear the clinking of teaspoons on serving plates and the conversations at the bar. Elsa listens to a bald man with a gruff voice criticize Professor Bauman’s optimism about the situation. It is September 1, 1939, and black smoke is billowing on the horizon, but for some reason, Professor Viktor Bauman is not afraid.
The Astoria Café really did exist. It was a haven for artists and thinkers during the 1930s in the otherwise industrial town of Łódź, Poland. My mother often told me the story of how my obsession with this history began: I was just a boy, no taller than a fire hydrant, when I first looked up at the bookshelf, tall and white, which lorded over the wooden cabinets filled with trinkets and old toys. As the story goes, I climbed onto the cabinets, stood on my tiptoes, and pulled down a thick black book with red ink scrawled on the spine, William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
From that moment onwards, I became obsessed. I collected books, action figures, DVDs, military medals, anything that might help me understand the calamity of World War Two. I watched (and re-watched) Nuit et Brouillard, Life is Beautiful, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan. I played every video game I could find, mastering Medal of Honor and Company of Heroes and Brothers in Arms, hoping that sooner or later I’d understand what it was like to live through those times. The obsession stayed with me through university and graduate school — a degree in Holocaust studies, another in the psychology of genocide — but the more I studied, the less I understood. What did that little boy at the bookshelf know that I could no longer remember?
