Transgression

A fourteen-year old American boy and his parents escape from the Nazi-occupied Balkans during World War II. They travel from Bulgaria through Turkey and the Middle East to America but danger pursues them on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic when their ship is attacked by a German submarine, and threatened by the battleship Tirpitz.

With compelling prose Stoltzfus makes each character come vividly alive: Mirka, a Gypsy, the family maid who seduces the boy, Mireille, a precocious French girl who introduces him to Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir, his devout father, a pacifist, Archangel and Satan fighting over the boy's soul, which he thinks is going in one direction but, because soul is all around him, is going everywhere and nowhere.

Although Transgression describes war and seduction, it is also a trip through international literature. Throughout, the wind, flowers, nightingales and symbolic colors in Oriental rugs foreshadow things to come. Hitler's rants, poetry and dreams appear as recurring tropes--images that are woven into the woof and weft of the writing process. They are the golden thread. Subtly honed with hallmark precision and keen insight, Transgression exemplifies the best in narrative art.

 
­Ben Stoltzfus is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, and French at the University of California, Riverside. He is a novelist, translator, literary critic and inter-arts scholar. He has published many articles on twentieth-century French, English, and American writers, 12 monographs of literary criticism on Chennevière, Robbe-Grillet, Gide, Lacan, and others, as well as books on Hemingway, Magritte, D.H. Lawrence, and Jasper Johns. An award-winning writer, he has received a fair share: Fulbright, Camargo, Gradiva, Humanities, Creative Arts, and MLA. He has published six novels and two collections of short stories. Romoland, a pictonovel, written in collaboration with Judith Palmer, the artist, was published in 2017. The collection Falling and Other Stories was published in 2018. The novel, Dumpster for God's Sake, was published in 2019. Alliecats, text by Ben Stoltzfus, illustrations by Allie Kirschner, his granddaughter. Alliecats is a collection of 53 graphic tales and word-puns about cats beginning with the prefix cat: catalog, catsup, catwalk, etc., published in 2019.­­­ The Silver Award novel, Transgression: Hitler, Mirka, Mireille, and Me, was published in 2022. 2022 also saw the publication of D.H. Lawrence's Final Fictions: A Lacanian Perspective. Stoltzfus lives in Riverside, California, with his artist wife, Judith Palmer.