Released through: Indra Publishing, March 2004
Fiction: First Edition
ISBN: 1 92078703 8
APN: 9781920787035
With GST, $26-95
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
344pp

The Trembling Bridge, by Manfred Jurgensen, explores migration as a rite of passage. It tells the story of Mark, a story in two parts. Part 1 is his boyhood in southern Denmark and northern Germany toward the end of WWII. The second part is about his migration and settlement in Australia, the land of the "beautiful enemy".

Mark is delicate as a child, who suffers the loss of his father in the war and the premature death of a friend. As the war ends he sees in the refugees who flood into his town, the horror of displacement, hunger, fear, defeat. Because of his ill-health, Mark has to stay for some time in a sanatorium, where he is fascinated and frightened by a very charismatic bigger boy, Sannes, who on one occasion, sexually assaults him. Sannes is the focus of the sequel novel to be published by Indra in late 2004, The Eyes of the Tiger.

Mark's first home in Australia is the Bonnegilla migrant camp, where his ability with English language and his mature, stable manner quickly earn him the position of a liaison person between the camp officials and some of the less settled new arrivals.

Mark is offered a clerical job at Melbourne University, and commences work in the office of the secondary school examinations board. Gradually, as his life becomes more established, he enrolls as a student at Melbourne University, and moves into Newman College, an on-campus residential hall.

The story ends on a positive note, with Mark still at Newman, and finally receiving what he interprets as a call to life. It is as if, after the often harrowing hard work of growing up and settling into a new country he feels he is about to set off into the independence of his maturity.

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