Joseph Kovler
Joe writes historical fiction based on Long Island’s varied and rich history. He has written a number of award-winning scripts including a science fiction/love/pirate tale set in the 1700’s about Captain Kidd’s wife Sarah. The plight of three Jewish boxers at a Nazi summer camp in Yaphank, NY, as World War II developed in Europe, was the basis for his award-winning script and first novella of the same name, “At the Corner of Hitler and Goering.” The dramatic accounting of the experiences of two Cuban refugees sponsored by the CIA and the Catholic Church as part of “Operation Pedro Pan” and sent to live at the Camp Hero Air Force Base in Montauk, NY during the Cuban Missile Crisis was the inspiration for his script, "Camp Hero," and the novella, "Dangerous Crossings."
HENDERSONVILLE OLYMPICS - NEW FOR 2023!
In the summer of 1965, Josh, an athletic fourteen-year-old Jewish boy from New York City, travels to Hendersonville, North Carolina. He spends this summer with four distant and culturally different cousins who invite him to participate in the teenage rural “Olympics.” These sports, all foreign to him, include shooting, rock skipping, horseshoe throwing, wood chopping, fishing, and mountain relay races.
Living next to a white supremacist soldier returning from Vietnam and his brother, who is about to leave for Vietnam, Josh is exposed for the first time to a war that has yet to make the headlines. The police suspect these two brothers of stealing and killing family dogs in and around Hendersonville. As the police question them, Josh finds himself in mortal danger, and he experiences anti-Semitism at a level he hasn’t seen before.
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DANGEROUS CROSSINGS
A Dramatic Account of Cuban Refugees
From the author of "At the Corner of Hitler and Goering"
The dramatic accounting of the experiences of two Cuban refugees sponsored by the CIA and the Catholic Church as part of "Operation Pedro Pan" and sent to live at the Camp Hero Air Force Base in Montauk, NY during the Cuban Missile Crisis was the inspiration for Kovler's script, "Camp Hero," and the novella, "Dangerous Crossings."
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AT THE CORNER OF HITLER AND GOERING
Dealing a Blow to Nazi Ideology
In 1938, against a backdrop of the war in Europe, German Max Schmeling loses to the American Joe Louis in the first round of a fight at Yankee Stadium. After watching the defeat of his national hero to a "schwarze," and to Max Baer, a Jew, a few years earlier, Karl Seger decides to stage a boxing exhibition at Camp Siegfried, the Nazi youth camp he runs on Long Island, inviting three Jewish boxers, trainer Jackie and his proteges Ruby and Moe, to serve as sacrificial lambs in a display of German superiority.
For Seger, the exhibition is a way to advance his career and to restore his wounded pride and the pride of his people. For the Jewish boxers it is a chance to physically take a stand against anti-Semitism and deal a blow to Nazi ideology.
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Five-Star Bronze Winner for the Novella Category in the 2022 HFC Book of the Year contest
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