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Debut novel conjures nostalgic memories of first love

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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/20387/full/20387/debut-novel-conjures-nostalgic-memories-of-first-love/ Debut novel conjures nostalgic memories of first love Friday, August 22, 2003 | by dan pine The tears come easily to 88-year-old Walter Kuttner. Memories of lost friends and family that never made it out of Nazi Germany still cut him to the core. But somehow, he has lost none of his wit and sparkle. "I'm not a good Jew," he says. "Just a sentimental one." Well, he's half-right. The sentiment is there, but, despite his modesty, so is a devotion to the Jewish people and his Jewish heritage. Today, Kuttner and his wife, Sherrill, live in contented retirement in Santa Rosa. He lived the good life in postwar America, with successful careers as a businessman and high school teacher. Now, he has another title to add to the resume: novelist. His semi-autobiographical "Pages From Paradise" recalls three years from Kuttner's youth living on the island of Mallorca just before the Spanish Civil War. It was there, after fleeing prewar Germany, that Kuttner encountered his first love, a local beauty descended from Chuettas (Mallorcan Jews who converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition). And of all the amazing tales from his life, that love affair, along with a fictional account of what happened to Mallorca's Jews after the war, is what he chose to write about for his first novel. The book is an outgrowth of a creative writing class Kuttner took a few years back. In one assignment, the teacher asked students to "write a letter you wish you'd written long ago." Kuttner's letter to his long-lost girlfriend, whom he has never seen again, stirred memories of a tumultuous past and happy days in the Mediterranean paradise. Born in 1915 and raised in the suburbs of Berlin, Kuttner enjoyed a fairly normal boyhood until his parents turned him over to an uncle, who took over custodial care when Kuttner turned 11. His father, though Jewish, strongly disapproved of religion, and Kuttner was brought up with no formal religious education. But, as he says, "Being Jewish in an anti-Semitic country is not good for self-esteem. It was frightening to see those [SS] bastards in their jackboots." By 1934, Kuttner's family sensed bad times coming, even though, as Kuttner tearfully recalls, many friends scoffed at the notion that their fellow Germans would turn on them. They were wrong. Kuttner, 18 at the time, moved to Mallorca to live with another uncle in what he supposed was a safe haven. It was, for a while. He worked in his uncle's stationery store located in Mallorca's red light district. In his spare time, he studied commercial art and learned Spanish fluently. But his life on the island took its happiest turn when he met Andrea Mascar�, then about 18, at a dance. As he writes so quaintly of his new friend in the forward to his book, "She had insisted on the condition that we should not embrace or kiss, which I grudgingly observed, but I can assure you that I looked longingly at her lips." Kuttner's novel is told from Andrea's point of view in diary form. After the fictional "Walter" flees for America following the outbreak of civil war, the novel follows Andrea's life in the underground and later, along with her Sephardic husband, her co-founding of the synagogue La Comunidad Israelita de Palma de Mallorca. (In 1988, Kuttner and his wife journeyed back to the island to worship at this very synagogue.) In 1937, Kuttner, along with many other Jews fearing the rise of fascism, evacuated Mallorca. He came to America, and within a couple of years returned to Europe, this time in the uniform of the U.S. Army, 606th Camouflage Unit, to fight the Nazis. His Army buddies called him "Shorty." After the war, Kuttner settled in Houston, starting out as a stock clerk and eventually owning his own office supply store. There he stayed, a family man for the next 42 years (sadly, his first wife died in 1970). He and his second wife, Sherrill, moved to Sonoma County in 1980, ostensibly for retirement. But Kuttner's language skills -- he's fluent in German, English, Latin and Spanish -- were needed in the local schools, and he became a bilingual teacher in Petaluma. Kuttner's golden years also proved a golden age in terms of expressing his Jewish roots. He became a bar mitzvah at age 66 and has been a congregant, board member and choir member at Santa Rosa's Congregation Shomrei Torah for many years. (He jokingly refers to his synagogue as "Our Lady of Perpetual Tsuris.") To further prove age is no obstacle to achievement, Kuttner also earned a degree in art history and is an accomplished painter of watercolors. Even today, nearly 70 years after the fact, Kuttner still thinks of his idyllic days on the island, and he thinks of the beautiful, lost Andrea Mascar�. "Maybe," he muses, "she's a Mother Superior on a convent." And why write the story now, so late in life? Kuttner has a quick and wry reply: "Like Mount Everest, it was there, and I wanted to climb it."

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