Wechsler secretly decided to leave the army. On the same weekend that he received the packet, Wechsler left his army station and jumped into the Danube, swimming across to the Soviet zone on the other side.

“[Wechsler] was the anti-Holden Caulfield, a red antithesis of J.D. Salinger’s lonely, alienated teen traveler in Manhattan,” historian Mark Solomon writes in the afterword to Wechsler’s book.

As Solomon points out, Wechsler’s experiences are both idiosyncratic and generational. Like many radical youths of the post-Depression era, Wechsler was drawn to the egalitarian ideals of socialism and communism. His book provides a glimpse into the little-known generation “nestled between the highly visible Depression and World War II radical generations and the new left boomers of the sixties.”

Once in Germany, Wechsler was picked up by Russians who sent him deeper into East Germany. The cultural atmosphere in East Germany was vibrant thanks in part to the presence of other ex-pats and self-exiled intellectuals from the West.

Wechsler enrolled in the journalism program at the prestigious Karl Marx University. Comparing the experience to his years at Harvard, Wechsler says that “in both cases, we had good and bad lecturers, and we had hard-line dogmatists.”

After graduating from Karl Marx, Wechsler worked as an organizer at a clubhouse before becoming a professional journalist in the ’60s. He supported himself with writings about the United States, a topic of great interest to the East German public. And he assumed the name Victor Grossman, the pseudonym under which Crossing the River will be published next September.

Wechsler told The Crimson that even in these years there was western television everywhere in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), although the authorities discouraged children from watching it. The East German public struggled to reconcile competing images of cold capitalism with the glamorous America of Hollywood films. Wechsler’s background provided him unique insights into the mysterious United States in politically isolated East Germany.

While Crossing the River is Wechsler’s first major American work, he authored five books while in East Germany. The subjects of these books ranged from general American history to the history of American music up to Bruce Springsteen.

Wechsler also penned a best-selling autobiography based on his hitchhiking experiences during his college years and a children’s book about “a hippopotamus who landed in the GDR.”

The first section of Crossing the River, about Wechsler’s American youth, was originally published in German in the 1980s under the title Route Across the Border.

“Some people thought it was about how to go cross to West Germany,” Wechsler says.

With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and an inflow of American and West German commercial products, demand for Wechsler’s insights diminished. Wechsler sustained himself during this gap by translating and providing voices for 200 episodes of the television western series Rawhide.

It wasn’t until 1994, forty-three years after his departure, that Wechsler was able to return to the United States after being formally discharged from the American army.

“One of the things which made me happiest [upon returning] was the robins and blue jays,” Wechsler says. “When I saw the first blue jay, it really made my heart leap.”

His years in East Germany made Wechsler appreciate other facets of life in America as well, Wechsler says. He describes his early reaction to the presence of “whole lines of spaghetti sauce” in an American supermarket, which he found “overwhelming.”