Holding On

About the Book

HOLDING ON is a chronicle of a modern Don Juan. In his early twenties, exceedingly handsome, self-assured, he finds himself incapable of reciprocating love. As a fashion model, he wins fame as the “heroic” leather-jacketed figure in a World War II Air Force recruitment poster. Popular recognition and approval of that personal are too heady to resist: he enlists in the Air Force. On a mission over enemy territory, he is shot down, surviving with a broken limb. His horror of being captured and tortured is obsessive, because he is Jewish. To conceal his lineage, he switches dogtags and identification papers with his dead co-pilot, and is at pains throughout his adventures on the ground to hide further evidence of his ancestry. What follows is an odyssey through a degraded and devastated land where he is in turn sheltered, assaulted, forced by a degenerate captor to perform unspeakable tasks, violated and finally required to murder an adolescent solder to hold on. Through most of his journey, he assumes the guise of a deaf-mute, having been warned by a benefactress that his effort to speak the enemy tongue is a giveaway. Totally estranged from his former life, intent only on survival, he finds emotional release to return love and has a passionate affair with a woman who in the end dies so that he may survive. Ina dramatic denouement, the surviving pilot, now back home, feels impelled to sacrifice himself so that others may live.

About the Author

William M. Wolf was born in the Bronx, New York City, on the fourth of July, 1923. He attended local public schools and the College of the City of New York and New York University. During World War II, he served for thirty months in the Eighth Air Force in England. For thirty years he wrote advertising copy for a leading advertising agency and retuned as vice-chairman of that company. Since, he has written six novels and some forty short stories, most of which have not been submitted for publication – not since his literary agent passed away. Xlibris is his first such effort in some years. He resides in Teaneck, N.J., is married, has two sons and three grandchildren