 |
| Marina Gottlieb Sarles at her book signing. |
As a little girl growing up on two sleepy Bahamian islands in the 1950s and 60s, Marina Gottlieb Sarles listened to stories told by her German immigrant parents.
“My parents were born story tellers,” said Gottlieb Sarles, the author of Sand in My Shoes... A collection of Island Stories.
“I never watched the TV until I was 16, and a lot of our evenings were spent around the table telling stories.”
And thus was laid the foundation for a collection of stories about growing up in The Bahamas. The stories are told from the perspective of the daughter of parents who put the horrors of World War II behind them, as they endeared themselves to local residents by providing the only medial care available.
“People would walk for miles on the sand and rocks just to get to my father,” recalled Gottlieb Sarles, who lives in Freeport, Grand Bahama.
Her parents, Dr. Ejnar F. Gottlieb, originally from Dreden, was a student during most of the second world war, as was his future wife, Owanta Gottlieb von Sanden. He briefly served on a German U-Boat.
“As a child, my parents told me that they could not bear what had happened in Germany,” Gottlieb Sarles related during an interview.
“They never wanted to be part of the rebuilding because they could not stand to rebuild a country that had killed and hurt so many people,” she said. They swam across the Rhine River into Switzerland; her father’s mother was Swiss.
A self-published book, “Sand in My Shoes” is now in its third printing and has earned back its publishing cost, Gottlieb Sarles said.
“The Circumstantial Dentist” describes her parent’s arrival at Pine Ridge, Grand Bahama, in the 1940s. It “was truly a pioneer settlement,” revolving around a lumber camp, the story relates.
Her father was hired by American financier Wallace Groves, one of Freeport’s founders.
The story relates, “My father’s job was to give medical attention to those injured by the cruel blade of a power-saw, as well as others in the settlement who were just downright sick or diseased.” His medical clinic was “a wooden shack resembling a chicken coop”—one where he nevertheless performed “amazing surgical feats.”
Some stories describe coming of age experiences. “When Death Comes Smiling” recalls how the author, as a 10-year-old, witnessed her father’s frantic efforts to save a dying child. The boy was rushed into his Abaco medical clinic while she was helping her father to count out pills. The Gottlieb family, Marina and her two brothers, lived in Grand Bahama and Abaco.
ESPN, the cable channel, produced a segment for its True Outdoor Adventures program, based on the story “Peter and the Shark.” It recounts a local fisherman’s battle with a large shark after going overboard on a solo trip.
Published in 2004, the book’s forward was written by Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham, before he reentered politics to run in last May’s general election. A native of Pine Ridge, Ingraham called the stories “an important addition to the growing body of Bahamian literature spawned by our growing awareness of ourselves as a people with our own identity…”
“The Accidental Dentist” was included in a recent collection of Caribbean stories published by Macmillan Caribbean, “Under the Perfume Tree.”
In a recent review, The Jamaica Gleaner’s Paul H. Williams called it the “most humorous” story in a book that “well could have been a Caribbean history reference book, teaching lessons of history by using fictitious and non-fictitious characters and circumstances to tell the Caribbean story.” |
