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Tightrope!
by Sonja Herbert
TIGHTROPE!
An Award Winning True Story
Margot Edel, a half-Jewish fashion model, survives the Night of Broken Glass in her Jewish boss's store. But the new owner eventually fires her. Margot needs new employment, but no one will hire her.
When she turns to her fiance, Sergey, he instead of helping her, accuses her of infidelity. Margot breaks up with him.
A resistance movement against Hitler and the Nazis helps her find new employment, but Sergey starts stalking her.
Eventually the Nazis force her new employer to give her notice. In desperation, she applies as a ticket taker at circus Althoff, and is hired.
Margot spends the summer in relative safety from the Nazis, selling circus tickets. When she visits her family in Berlin at the end of the summer, she has a fight with her mother, who is mortified to have a daughter in the circus. She wants Margot to stay with Sergey.
When Margot has several run ins with the Nazi powers while the show is in Berlin, she hires on with another circus, that travels the smaller German towns.
Margot is shocked when she realizes that the manager in the new circus is a Nazi Party member. He recognizes Margot and gives her an ultimatum: either she becomes his mistress, or faces death in a concentration camp.
Will Margot be able to stay out of his clutches?
The decision she has to make is even more difficult, since she has met and fallen in love with the rightful Polish owner of the circus, Kolya Francesco.
Margot devises a daring plan to outwit the Nazi manager and find a measure of happiness with her true love in the circus.
Will her plan succeed? Or will she end up another victim of the Holocaust?
Read more about it at germanwriter.com
500 pages · Published in 2009
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Cross and Carnival
by Sonja Herbert
CROSS AND CARNIVAL
An Award Winning Memoir
Many people, when they are young, dream of running away to the circus and living the wild, free life in a carnival caravan. For little Sonja, the dream was to run away from the carnival her family ran, and live in a real house, with a farmer’s wife as a mother, as she retells in this excerpt from her memoir, Cross and Carnival:
I peeked around the farmer’s wife’s heavy frame and spied a cross with Jesus hanging from it on the hallway wall. Again, I wondered what it would be like to live in a house and not to travel all the time. I would have friends for a long time, not just for a few days. And maybe, if I had a farmer’s wife for a mother, she’d be happy when I prayed. After all, she had a cross on her wall. We only had Vati’s violins on ours.
Sonja grew up trying to combine the strange dichotomy of the traveling carnival her agnostic parents ran with the faith in a loving God she developed when still very young. Her childhood and youth was a long effort to combine the two, or to at least make it possible for her to live her faith without being ridiculed.
Others only dream of the wonder and mystique Sonja lived in the summers, as her family's caravan traveled from fair to fair in Post WW II Germany. The colorful rides and delightful festive moods of the strangers around her soaked into her soul and colored her dreams. The music of the carousel lulled her to sleep at night, and the concession and candy stands held the same fascination for her and her five siblings that it held for the local children.
Cross and Carnival shows the wonder that underlay Sonja's childhood as a carnie kid. It also tells of life in a cramped caravan and her relationship with her pragmatic mother, who was overwhelmed with six children in an impossibly small space, and had lost her faith a long time ago.
It also shows the bitter side of carnival life, the uprootedness and lack of friends, and the strange and sometimes scary characters who dealt with the carny family, and who impressed Sonja's life. Through it all, Sonja struggled to attain a semblance of a normal life, a life in which she could live with faith and without the derision of her family.
Several chapters of this poignant memoir have won awards in literary contests, and are published in anthologies and on the Internet.
Read the award-winning prologue at germanwriter.com
450 pages · Published in 2010
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