396 words. Only 1 full stop!
All I have to say to that is .......
Once
upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined
middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word
by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in
man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow
unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself
in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a
table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be
precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years
old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of
opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist,
fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it
seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a
series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the
father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew,
curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German
occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young
man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man,
however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his
who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother
and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported
they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never
returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and
that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who,
during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a
farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the
opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about
and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn
a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.
—
Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing
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