I've been thinking all year about the uncle I never met. Which means I have also been thinking about the Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers, since he and my mother were big fans. And I stumbled upon this Slate podcast episode that imagines Brooklyn -- and a minor nearby city named Manhattan -- if in fact the Dodgers had stayed (at least until 2018):
https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/what-if-the-dodgers-had-never-left-brooklyn.html
The first short story connected with my NEA grant, indeed the first short story I ever translated by Edith Bruck -- it's now published!
Thanks to the Hunger Mountain Translation Prize, you can find the story, which is called "Silvia," at this link:
https://hngrmtn.org/issues/hunger-mountain-27/translation/
My thanks to Allison Grimaldi Donahue who chose the story from the other contest entries and to Ms. Bruck for entrusting me with her work.
This story is about a young German boy who is the son of a high-ranking Nazi official. He finds a Jewish stowaway and brings her home to the horror of his proud Third Reich-worshipping mother. The best line? Tough to say but how about, "You always wanted a little girl."
I can only hope many people find their way to the story. Not only because I translated it but because it reminds us, to quote a line of verse from Bruck, that "once upon a time/there was Auschwitz."
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That was my original title for the essay -- what I read after my father died -- and still the one that best reflects what inspired this remembrance, which I wrote about spending the past year reading and re-reading the books my father had accumulated over a lifetime:
https://themillions.com/2023/01/the-books-that-made-my-father.html
Grateful to The Millions for agreeing to publish an essay no one needs to read but which I most certainly needed to write.
More books to come (and truth be told, I still have to finish Gulag Archipelago. It makes for dense reading!).
I am grateful for the legacy my father left me -- a love of reading so intense it's like a person in my life.
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