Paul F. Marzell

author of Heimat

p.marzell@comcast.net

I was born and raised in Philadelphia and currently reside in western Pennsylvania with my wife, Janet.  I served in the United States Air Force in West Germany in the early sixties. I earned BSBA and MBA degrees in operations management and financial analysis from Temple University in Philadelphia and Golden Gate University in San Francisco. My business experience includes thirty years in the airline industry in various nonmanagement and management positions with domestic and international responsibilities. I was also employed as a customer service manager for a light industry manufacturing company and as the operations manager for a satellite TV network. Heimat is my first novel.

Inspiration

GENISIS

I was inspired to write Heimat when I was building an ancestry binder for my first grandchild. I had a trove of documents from my father who immigrated to the United States in 1929.  In addition to his birth certificate, immigration documents, passport, TS Bremen ticket, and various German and United States government forms, he saved letters from his mother, sisters, and other relatives sent to him in the years before and after World War Two. I was intrigued to learn what was written in the letters. There were more than thirty letters, most handwritten in the Sütterlin Schrift so I had to transliterate them into modern, readable German and then translate them into English. These letters not only facilitated the timeline for the story but also provided the narrative which was the conflict of an immigrant’s allegiance to his country of origin, or his commitment to his adopted country during World War Two, and his mother’s hopes to see her son again.

Although I started writing Heimat more than two years ago and published it in September 2021, the story has parallels to events happening today in eastern Europe.

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