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Press Release

Contact: Linda Radke, Five Star Publications, Inc.
Phone: (480) 940-8182 Fax: (480) 940-8787

Author captures memories before they fade completely away

Touching, humorous stories of Jews in WWII Amsterdam

PHOENIX, AZ -Meyer Sluyser was born in Amsterdam in 1901, the son of Sara and Mozes, a diamond cutter. Although it was intended that he follow in his father's professional footsteps, it was soon obvious that young Meyer was bound to follow another path. By the 1930s, as both a journalist and a politician, he was a leading voice in the fight against fascism and when the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, he was a marked man.

As a Gestapo squad was being dispatched to his house to arrest and no doubt kill him, Sluyser and his family escaped to England where he was made a member of Queen Wilhelmina's advisory committee during her period of exile in London. Upon his return to his hometown following the war, he was devastated by what he saw and learned. All of his relatives had been murdered, block after block of once-familiar homes and shops lay in ruins. He immediately decided that their memories should not similarly disappear.

He began writing everything he could recall of them-his grandmother who supported herself and her five small children with just a pushcart and some oranges and who regularly fasted to get her way, his father's conveniently imaginary friend Mr. Lebovitz, Cohennetje who believed if he could find a bisexual red cabbage that it would prove once and for all his thesis that there are no aberrations in nature. And he wrote of Mr. Monday, the neighborhood cobbler, "a restless seeker and at the same time a musing dreamer" who repaired shoes by day and sought alchemic answers to the mysteries of the universe by night.

In his non-fiction work Mr. Monday, Sluyser paints vivid pictures of a simpler time fraught with complex emotions. He writes of rugged people with tender emotions tested beyond human comprehension during the Nazi invasion. Sluyser's characters face life-and death-with indefatigable humor and resolve.

Mr. Monday (ISBN 1-58985-007-6, $14.95, non-fiction, published by Five Star Publications, Inc., trade paperback) will be available June 2004. To request a free review copy, please contact Linda Radke at Five Star Publications, Inc., by phone, fax, or e-mail at Monday@FiveStarPublications.com.

ISBN 978-1-58985-007-1
$ 14.95
Published by Five Star Publications, Inc.
Trade Paperback