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 that, strictly speaking, 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 beloved person with whom I share my life.
He was a voracious reader, maybe voracious just in general, which made the period of his convalescence very difficult for me. As I wrote at one point, I could scarcely recall his ever lying down much less spending days, weeks, months staring out the window, no question on his lips, no garden task to tackle, no overseas trip to plan.
Nothing can bring back all of our precious dead, but there are ways we can relive the time we spent with them, and immersing myself in the books my father loved is one such way.
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