Max Freedland

My Heritage Calls Max Freedland

After attending a one-room school with only nine pupils, four of which were his siblings, Max struggles to adjust to a city junior high school so large that the three stories of teenagers must move to classrooms only in a counter-clockwise direction. At age seventeen he sits on a one-person inquest panel to judge if an oppressive CCC Camp captain was murdered or 'just got dead.' Max proposes in the rumble seat of a Model B Ford on a blind date on Friday, and elopes with Ray on Sunday, to be married by a Justice of the Peace. As a defense worker and father of two, Max avoids the draft until the last year of WW II. He fails his overseas eye exam, and trains as an army cook. Max is profoundly affected when he learns of the horror of the Holocaust. He joins a synagogue and embraces his Jewish heritage-sort of.