Irma Fritz was born in Ukraine of German ancestry. By the time she immigrated to the U.S., she had already lived in five countries: Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. Ms. Fritz developed a passion for writing at an early age. As a child, growing up in post-WWII Germany, she wrote poetry and short stories, and immersed herself...
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Irma Fritz was born in Ukraine of German ancestry. By the time she immigrated to the U.S., she had already lived in five countries: Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. Ms. Fritz developed a passion for writing at an early age. As a child, growing up in post-WWII Germany, she wrote poetry and short stories, and immersed herself in reading the classics. She loved especially the novels of the Russian writers, such Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, where she was able to read of the land in which she was born, but didn’t know. Upon moving to the U. S., she earned a B.A. in English from Cal State L.A., where she studied poetry with Henri Coulette and fiction writing with Wirt Williams, a writer in his own right as well as teacher/mentor to Darryl Ponicsan (“The Last Detail,” “Cinderella Liberty”). After graduation, she spent some years working as press agent at various Hollywood PR companies, where she wrote celebrity bios, film synopsis, and product publicity material. After moving to Seattle, she worked in banking administration and human resources; her most recent position held was that of Human Resources Officer for a Seattle area Savings & Loan.
As creative writing had been a passion postponed only by the need to earn a living, Ms. Fritz continued to hone her writing skills at the University of Washington as well as other writers’ workshops. In the fall of 2008, she published her debut novel, “Irretrievably Broken” (Amazon.com), which was subsequently (January 2009) chosen among the top 20 novels by the online magazine, “Cold Coffee.” The work was ultimately inspired by a newspaper clipping from her hometown in Germany. A neighboring property had been torn down and a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, was unearthed. Experts speculated that a synagogue would most likely be situated beneath the foundations of the house she had lived in as a child. Ms. Fritz says, “I read the clipping and promptly forgot about it. Or so I thought! But this discovery must have been burned into my subconscious. After I finished the novel, I rediscovered the clipping and realized how these facts had informed my writing. There, at the heart of a story of adventure and travel, of love and loss, was a Holocaust story, come to light after years of concealment, very much like the mikvah that had been unearthed so many years later under our former neighbor's house in a small German town where no one in post-WWII Germany ever spoke about such things.”
Ms. Fritz is now at work on her second novel, a satiric exploration of the rise and fall of predatory home mortgage lenders. She and her husband live in the Seattle area where they enjoy biking and hiking in the beautiful outdoors of the PNW.
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