Cornwell: A Stranger in My World

By David Pliner

The story takes place in three periods: the present, the past, and in a stream of consciousness that randomly appears throughout the novel as thoughts appear to us every day. This is written in italics and is semiautobiographical.

The Holocaust is only a small part of the story. The actual story is about local, prominent men, who belong to the same restricted country club and who engage in projects, at taxpayer expense, that nets them huge profits. They think that their actions benefit the city but, in actuality, are harmful, wasteful and destructive.

There is a portrait gallery in the Quail Roost Club that features portraits of these important club members with vivid descriptions of their activities and actions. The president of the club takes a Jewish real estate agent on a tour of the gallery even though the club is restricted.

The novel also delves into aging, time, survival, and the meaning of existence. It briefly mentions the death of Jesus. The novel also deals with how nefarious Nazis are able to escape to South America and then to the United States and how they deal with guilt, evil, and denial. Love, sex, humility, humanity, and humor are also subjects that are covered in this novel.

The fact that I was the only Jew in two of the schools I attended and how it affected me through the stream of consciousness is a vital part of the story. Being a minority person seems to have bothered other people more than it bothered me, but I was confronted with problems that most people didn’t face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543417760

David Pliner

David Pliner is seventy-nine years old and has embarked upon a new career, and this is his first novel. David published a collection of short stories last year called SHORT, SHORT TALES. Writing is a lifelong ambition, but this is the first opportunity David has had to write after retiring from a real estate career to become a full-time caregiver. David studied both American and British literature and poetry in college. He is now working on a second novel to be published sometime next year. Writing is difficult, and David hopes you will enjoy the books as much as he enjoyed writing them. The purpose behind each story is to make the reader think. David is particularly influenced by both poets and authors, namely Isaac Singer, T. S. Eliot, James T. Farrell, John Mortimer, Nelson DeMille and Fredrick Forsythe.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by David Pliner.

Cover Art by: Raquel Rodriguez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 04/24/2017

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

744638

CONTENTS

Foreword: Cornwell A Stranger In My World

Chapter One: Thoughts On A Gloomy Day

Chapter Two: The City

Chapter Three: The Club

Chapter Four: Background

Chapter Five: The Hall Of Potentates

Chapter Six: The Portraits

Chapter Seven: Ending Without Resolution

FOREWORD

Cornwell

A Stranger In My World

This novel is based on a musical composition by the great Russian composer Modest Moussorgsky, a dissolute civil clerk who was a musical genius and belonged to a group of Nationalistic Russian Composers in the late Romantic era known as the Mighty Five.

After attending an exhibition by a well- known artist and close friend, Victor Hartmann, depicting scenes of Russian and Polish life and folklore, Moussorgsky composed a series of piano pieces, later orchestrated by Maurice Ravel to correspond to each picture, known as Pictures at an Exhibition. The composer walks through a gallery and inspects each picture, then composes a composition to best describe the scene in music. Moussorgsky had the most raw talent of all the Russian composers prior to the twentieth century, according to musicologists, conductors and artists but wasted his talent.

A Stranger in My World takes place in a posh, restricted country club, where pictures of the clubs most prominent members are displayed in a special room set aside for that purpose. The members all had six things in common: (1)They disliked Jews and blacks (2)They all were involved in projects promoted to either improve the quality of life in Cornwell or for civic improvement, not to mention the self-aggrandizement attributable to these projects (3)They all loved golf (4) They all attended church on Sunday (5)Most owned or controlled vast tracts of land that could be used to create projects to produce untold wealth in the name of civic improvement (6)They were all pseudo aristocrats with dubious backgrounds and histories that money kept hidden.

This novel is actually two stories that take place contemporaneously in three time periods: one takes place in the present, one in the past and the other consists of fragments of the storytellers life that takes place as a stream of consciousness in italics. This does not take place in chronological order but randomly as thoughts appear or as something triggers a thought; therefore the writing seems disjointed at times. Random thoughts are spontaneous and do not take place in chronological order. The story is more organized and vacillates between past and present

The novel is dark, satirical, humorous and thought provoking and contains many historical facts relating to the Holocaust and events that took place after in addition to the fictional writing that makes the two elements complementary. The novel also delves into basic questions of the Bible, evolution, and the meaning of existence and survival. The question is How do we survive in our current condition without completely destroying ourselves? The novel is a microcosm of humanity with its attributes and many faults.

You can’t really distinguish between the present and the past as both are on the same time line. We can’t physically recreate all past events, but our memories serve to connect us to the past. Millions of years from now on some distant world a thought that originated millions of years before on earth will emerge again in the mind of someone or something, and the process goes on and on.

David Pliner

A Stranger in My World

To all the Jews persecuted over the centuries for simply being Jewish and to my wife of fifty four years who encouraged me to write.

CHAPTER ONE

Thoughts On A Gloomy Day

One day a tombstone will be erected over a single grave containing two urns of ashes giving the names and dates of the births and deaths of the occupants. On the stone will be engraved the following: MARRIED FOR OVER HALF A CENTURY. TOGETHER IN LIFE, TOGETHER FOREVER.

The world is traif is a statement from an Isaac Singer collection of short stories. Traif is a Jewish or Yiddish word that means unclean or impure.

Beethoven and Brahms and the poetry and writing of Goethe and Schiller illustrate how high and noble a culture can climb. The infamous concentration camps of World War II demonstrate how far the same culture can plummet within the span of a century. World War II dramatically showed the extent to which Europe detested the Jew, with the exception of a few countries, and a few gallant, brave and sympathetic individuals scattered in most of the countries Germany occupied.

When a thought enters your mind, whether good or evil, novel or insipid, lascivious or sacrilegious, obsessive or funny, it never leaves. Tucked away and ensconced somewhere in your brain it remains dormant for seconds, hours, days, and even years. Without warning it can unfurl and emerge at any time as a miniscule blur or as a raging explosion of thoughts. It can haunt you for years, or disappear for an equal amount of time, but it never, ever dissipates. The more insidious or outlandish the thought, the more it unnerves, disconcerts, obsesses, haunts and jibes you.

The most vile thoughts fester and grow. They wrap around, trickle and slide into your convoluted cranial mass, and then those thoughts leach into the dark bowels of your brain until you expire or until they drive you to the edge of madness, or express themselves in some overt, recondite action. One day, perhaps millions or billions of years from now, a minute piece of that thought trapped in brain matter will alight somewhere in the universe as a mute reminder of what and who we were.

I weary of February and its lingering cold when palsied branches quiver in the frigid wind and wait for spring that never seems to come. It’s that time of year when time itself slows down. The sun slowly rises, the gloom of night dissipates, and the ensuing morning light burns off the mist and filters through an opening in my blinds, glides along a wall in an angular pattern that nurtures a mood of isolation and loneliness that revives memories long lost, and disinters emotions, emerging as fleeting and filamentous traces of reality. That combined with often merciless, restless sleep reveal those things we cannot come to grip with during