Carol Bergman

A powerful anthology of first-person stories by aid workers. From Afghanistan to Cambodia, Rwanda to Vietnam, Ecuador to Bosnia, these stories reveal how it really is on the ground in the world's hot spots. Covering natural disaster, war, and all-too-fragile peace, these emotionally raw accounts open an uncensored window onto the lives of aid workers and the triumphs and tragedies of the people they are trying to help in a troubled world.

"What Returns to Us" is set in New York in 1945 just before the Japanese surrender. Soldiers, sailors and airmen are returning home after four long years in Europe or Asia. America is not the same and they are not the same either. May Gilbert, promoted from secretary to reporter in 1941 when all the able-bodied men were drafted, is witness to these transformations and writes about them with curiosity and compassion. She loves the city, she loves her job, and she doesn’t want it interrupted again by sordid love affairs or a wounded brother. Like so many others, he suffers from shell shock and has to be hospitalized. May searches for the father that abandoned them when they were children and begins her own quest for a more meaningful career. Shifted to the foreign desk on the eve of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, she finds herself the lone dissenter in the news room: the blast may end the war but at what cost? And what are the implications for the future?

In the wake of the bomb—a weapon of mass destruction—May leaves her family and personal struggles behind and travels to Hiroshima with John Hersey to gather stories from survivors.

From journalist and essayist Carol Bergman comes an unconventional murder mystery/thriller, “Say Nothing,” set in upstate New York. Private Investigator Margaret Singer and New York State Police Senior Investigator Charlie Griffith team up to solve the disappearance of a decorated Iraq veteran, David Rizzo. Not far into the investigation, the seasoned detectives realize that the young man’s disappearance is only one of several related crimes committed in their jurisdiction and that the FBI has taken a controlling interest in the case and invoked the Patriot Act. When David’s girlfriend and a young Afghan girl are found murdered, the case becomes even more complex and challenging. At each turn in the investigation, the sense of danger intensifies. Is the government protecting a killer? Will David be found dead or alive?

Each story evokes the work of a famous artist—Gustav Klimt, Marc Chagall, John Singer Sargent, Maria Izquierdo, and a Sumerian woman working in Egypt during the reign of Akhenaton and Nefertiti more than three thousand years ago. Bergman explores the artists’ models, families, and the times in which they lived. Loosely based on historical research, these stories are gems of color, light, and love. Told in a variety of literary styles from first and third person to realistic and magically real, Sitting for Klimt is an elegant portrayal of the artistic mind.

From writer Carol Bergman comes a second collection of five unconventional novellas: Water Baby, The View From Here, Lost to Sight, Will Wonders Never Cease and The Unforgiven. Told from the point of view of a baby, a kidnapped bride, a country doctor, Houdini and Freud, and a young Pilgrim woman, each story is set in a diverse time and place. Elegiac, tragic or sensuous, Bergman evokes the complexities of life as it is challenged and transformed.

In the summer of 1994, journalist Carol Bergman traveled to Vienna with her elderly mother, a Holocaust refugee, and her daughter. Together, these three generations of women uncovered their family's history and the Austrian complicity in the Nazi genocide.

Like other children of the Holocaust, Carol Bergman grew up oblivious to her parents' story of resistance and escape. Breaking her mother's silence and recording an oral history grew into a hunt for a missing cousin, Fritzi Burger, the Olympic ice skating champion who disappeared at the beginning of the war and the resurfaced during the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan affair. But the search for Fritzi's story dead-ended in Vienna and the original manuscript was published before Fritzi had been truly "found." Then, in 2008, Fritzi Burger surfaced again in an email to the author from a former soldier in General MacArthur's army. In this revised and updated edition of "Searching for Fritzi," there is suspense, revelation and closure.

Nomads, Nomads 2 & Nomads 3 in one volume. Carol Bergman has gathered a potpourri of very short stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, verbal snapshots, and mini-essays. In these subtle, profound and original works, each using a different narrative persona, Bergman demonstrates her experience as a phrase maker and storyteller. Like Lydia Davis and Czeslaw Milosz, these books are unique and difficult to classify. Humorous, perceptive, precise, wry, sometimes chilling, she writes about war and peace, love and disappointment, the mundane and the sublime, with deep attention and warmth.