Short stories from the web.

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© 2011 – 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Once again, John Gardner’s fictive dream, as articulated by novelist Ian McEwan.  No one does psychological realism better than McEwan.  There is no other art form that can envelop us so completely and embed emotions within us so deeply.  We don’t read great books, we experience them.

See larger image Atonement: A Novel (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $5.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date February 25, 2003.

See larger image On Chesil Beach (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $3.17 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 10, 2008.

See larger image Saturday (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $15.95 USD New From: $5.37 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date April 11, 2006.

See larger image The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (Paperback) By (author) John Gardner List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $5.99 In Stock Used from: $2.53 In Stock Release date June 4, 1991.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

On an early summer afternoon in the tiny village of  North Dormer, Charity Royall sees from the distance a handsome young man, his manner and his clothing indicating that he is a wealthy city person.  Later, he stops in at the library that Charity unenthusiastically manages, in search of books about the local architecture and introduces himself as Lucius Harney.  Although his reason for visiting the library is entirely proper, and he has no motive for seducing or even flirty with the librarian, he is momentarily and involuntarily flustered by her beauty.  There is no flirtation at all in this meeting, but Charity notices Harney’s brief reaction and in the hours and days after that she repeatedly reflects on that moment even as her own obsession with Harney grows.

As the story unfolds we gradually learn more about Charity’s background.  She is the ward of Lawyer Royall, a prominent member of the community of North Dormer.  This is a somewhat dubious distinction considering how humble the village is; the only church in town lacks a fulltime minister and has services only every other Sunday. Its backwardness is revealed somewhat comically in Charity’s thoughts.

Charity was born into abject poverty in a place referred to as “The Mountain.”  Her destitute mother gave her up to Royall after her father had been convicted of manslaughter.  All that Charity can remember of her earlier life are fleeting images and she knows neither of her parents names.

As a work of naturalism, the behavior of all the characters in this story is driven by innate desires of which they are not entirely aware that conflict with the constraints and expectations of society.  Free will, if it exists at all, is exercised by negotiating in the path between conforming to the requirements of civilization (the nearby city of Nettleton) and giving in to primitive passion (“The Mountain”).  North Dormer, like Charity, exists somewhere between these two.  We see these internal conflicts play out not only in Charity but also in the two other main characters: Royall and Harney.

Wharton is one of the great literary stylists of naturalism (unlike, say, Theodore Dreiser), and of American Literature in general.  In Summer, her rendering of the landscape and season evokes the moods and desires of the characters.  The effect is poetic and, at times, intoxicating:

There had never been such a June in Eagle County.  Usually it was a month of moods, with abrupt alternations of belated frost and mid-summer heat; this year, day followed day in a sequence of temperate beauty.  Every morning a breeze blew steadily from the hills.  Toward noon it built up great canopies of white cloud the threw a cool shadow over fields and woods; then before sunset the clouds dissolved again, and the western light rained its unobstructed brightness on the valley.

On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge above a sunlit hollow, her face pressed to the earth and the warm currents of the grass running through her.  Directly in her line of vision a blackberry branch laid its frail white flowers and blue-green leaves against the sky.  Just beyond, a tuft of sweet-fern uncurled between the beaded shoots of grass, and a small yellow butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck of sunshine.  This was all she saw, but she felt, above her and about her, the strong growth of the beeches clothing the ridge, the rounding of pale green cones on countless spruce-branches, the push of myriads of sweet-fern fronds in the cracks of the stony slope below the wood, and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags in the pasture beyond.  All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of calyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of fragrance.  Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalations to the pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath of some huge sun-warmed animal.  (Chapter V)

Wharton was born into incredible wealth and most of her work focused on the rites and rituals of New York Society.  She moved comfortably and at ease in those circles, yet her work reveals a discerning and critical eye for passions and desires that beneath polite and tasteful manners.  The two works that are set in humble rural settings, Summer and Ethan Frome, take place in western Massachusetts.  She lived there, in Lennox, for some years in a magnificent house that she had built, but by the time she wrote Summer, she had been living in France for some years .  The landscape and its less affluent people had made an impression on her.  There are elements of harshness in her portrayals of them, but never is there any condescension in tone and it is clear that she had great affection for the land and its inhabitants.

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

Books Referenced:

See larger image Summer (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $5.99 USD New From: $4.19 In Stock Used from: $48.80 In Stock

See larger image Ethan Frome (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $8.00 USD New From: $3.55 In Stock Used from: $2.44 In Stock Release date October 25, 2005.

See larger image The Age of Innocence (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $8.98 USD New From: $7.00 In Stock Used from: $1.88 In Stock

See larger image The House of Mirth (Signet Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $4.95 USD New From: $2.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date May 3, 2005.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Thus begins Ivan Turgenev’s 1860 novella, First Love. At age sixteen while living in the country, Vladimir meets twenty-one-year-old Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina, the daughter of a titled but very poor family living on the adjoining property.  Zinaida is a beautiful and spirited young women and Vladimir falls hopelessly in love with her.  Zinaida toys with him mercilessly, enticing him with hints of a deep and romantic affection and, alternatively, pushing him away and treating him with condescending, sisterly affection. (Perhaps the 19th century equivalent of “Let’s just be friends.”)  At one point, she even asks Vladimir to look after her twelve-year-old brother, emphasizing the their age difference and that Vladimir is still just a boy.

Adding to Vladimir’s frustration are the numerous suitors who come calling on Zinaida every evening.  They are all older than Vladimir and superior to him in either wealth or social class.  She plays them all off one another, but occasionally indicates that she favors Vladimir.  On these occasions the young man’s heart swells and there is no joy greater than the joy felt by a young man in love for the first time.  There is also no sadness greater than the sadness brought on by unrequited love.

Vladimir is a sensitive and observant young man and he is able to see through Zinaida’s extreme coquettishness and notices a gradual change in her manner.  Beneath her façade, he can see that she truly is in love, but not with him.  Nor is it one of the other suitors, although at first he suspects it is one of them.  The penultimate heartbreak for Vladimir is that Zinaida’s secret love turns out to be Vladimir’s own father.  In the final chapters, this heartbreak story, as all good heartbreak, turns tragic.

Turgenev is one of the early practitioners of literary realism.  First Love is told in first person and adheres strictly to the limitations of omniscience that that point of view requires.  Turgenev uses that to his advantage in several specific places, such as when Vladimir witnesses an altercation between his father and Zinaida.  He is unable to hear what they are discussing, but his visual observation provides enough for for us to understand the depth nature of their relationship.

The true artistry of this novella is revealed at the conclusion when the reader reconsiders the entire story once again, this time taking a far more sympathetic view of both Zinaida (and really, the first time through she’s very hard to like) and Vladimir’s father.  What is finally revealed is that this story is not only a tale about a youthful unrequited love but also about Zinaida’s place in society, society’s expectations of all of us, and ultimately about the nature of love itself.

Turgenev’s influence is even more apparent in the development of psychological fiction.   He has a gentle touch that captures complex and nuanced emotional states in his characters and can be seen as a precursor to Henry James and Joseph Conrad.  This same approach to fiction can still be seen in such contemporary works as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.

Turgenev lived during changing times in Europe.  Later events would sweep away the aristocracy in his native Russia, but during his lifetime the social order, and the aristocracy that it supported,  was already crumbling.  The characters in First Love reflect this along with the very nature of the story that the older Vladimir tells to his shallow and passionless companions.

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

See larger image First Love (The Art of the Novella) (Paperback) By (author) Ivan Turgenev List Price: $10.00 USD New From: $6.08 In Stock Used from: $3.95 In Stock Release date September 1, 2004.

See larger image On Chesil Beach (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $3.17 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 10, 2008.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

At the very end of his life, Ernest Hemingway was convinced that the electroconvulsive therapy that had be used to treat his depression had destroyed his memory and, therefore, his ability to write.  Whether or not shock therapy can actually do that and whether or not it was true in Hemingway’s case has been argued ever since then, but Hemingway believed it and it was perhaps the final blow that pushed him into the despair from which he could find no escape.  About a year earlier, he had completed the manuscript for A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his early days in Paris when he was on the threshold of literary stardom.  While one might imagine that memories of true events are crucial ingredients for a memoir, they are not the only ingredients.  In the years since A Moveable Feast was first published it has been extensively fact-checked several times. Major parts of it cannot be verified, including an infamous anecdote involving F. Scott Fitzgerald, a ruler, and a men’s room, that I will forever refuse to believe ever happened. So really, what purpose did memory serve him in creating his memoir, especially since even though much of it may be fiction, it is still vivid and poignant, and a prime example of a literary genre?  For Hemingway, memory was everything and he couldn’t live without it.

So what is it about this fragile and mysterious thing called memory that sustains us, that inspires us, that tricks us, and sometimes horrifyingly eludes us, that makes it so essential to the creation of fiction?  And what is it about memory that is essential to the reading of fiction?

William Saleton’s recent profile of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus at Slate.com provides insight into the fragile nature of memory.  Loftus is a researcher who has studied, through experimentation on human subjects, the mechanisms of human memory.  In the course of her career, she has been a controversial figure.  She has shown how so-called eyewitness testimony in criminal cases can be unknowingly be shaped by police and prosecutors, helping defense lawyers obtain acquittals for their clients, and helping to overturn convictions based on eyewitness testimony.  Along the way she has stirred controversy in her own profession by  taking on proponents of recovered memory therapy in the early 1990’s, by arguing that the therapy itself created false memories of childhood abuse.  It’s still controversial today, but her efforts have resulted in tighter legal and professional guidelines.  Her shift in focus from proving eyewitness testimony to be flawed to proving recovered memories to be equally questionable had to have been motivated, at least in part, by her own experience.  Saleton writes:

Not even Loftus was immune to suggestion. In 1988, after 13 years of testifying about memory’s fallibility, she was told by her uncle that she was the one who had found her dead mother in the swimming pool. The sights and sounds of that awful morning came back to her—the corpse face down, the nightgown, the screaming, the stretcher, the police cars. But within three days, her uncle recanted the story, and other relatives confirmed that her aunt, not Loftus, had found the body. The memories of the memory expert were false.

Her false memory must have been so real and so vivid to her that when confronted with the truth she realized that memory was more fragile, and truth more elusive, then she had already established.

In 1990, Loftus testified in a murder trial for a murder that had happened twenty-one years earlier.  The defendant had been charged by his own daughter, who had suddenly recovered a repressed memory.  Loftus’ previous research had proved that eyewitness testimony could be altered, but she had not proved that entire memories could be made up.  The defendant was convicted.  And yet, from her own personal experience, she knew it was possible and set out to prove it.  Saleton writes:

Loftus began to read popular books that told women and therapists how to recover memories of sexual abuse. The books urged therapists to ask their clients about childhood incest. They listed symptoms that supposedly indicated abuse even if it wasn’t remembered. They invited women to search for memories by imagining the abuse. They encouraged group therapy in which women could hear one another’s stories of being victimized.

These ideas sounded fishy. Suggestion, indoctrination, authority, inference, imagination, and immersion were known to alter memories in police interrogations and experiments. But could they create a whole memory? Could the recent surge of incest recollections be the product of recovered-memory therapy?

Loftus conducted a number of experiments to see if it were possible, through careful manipulation, subjects could be induced into recalling vivid memories of things that never happened.  What she discovered is that it is possible to create a false memory in at least some of her subjects if certain conditions are met.  Interestingly, the conditions were met in her own very personal experience with false memories:

• The memory is suggested or verified by someone whom the subject trusts.  In her test subjects’ case, like her own experience, the facilitator is a relative.  In the books she read, the trusted facilitator was the therapist.
• The false memory contains true elements that trigger real sense or affective memories that become conflated with the false elements.

The rest is done by the subject’s own mind, unconsciously weaving true and the false together to form a convincing narrative that although false, might as well have happened because it is now part of the subjects self-identity. Loftus was able to create a recipe for a false memory.  It wasn’t always successful, but that it was successful at all shows how fragile our perceptions of reality can be.  Her most common recipe was the “lost in the mall experiment”:

Each subject was given summaries of four incidents from his childhood. Three stories were true; one was false. The false story followed a formula: You got lost in a mall or department store, you cried, you were found by an old person. The summaries were written with the help of older relatives who knew the true incidents and the family.

…

The subjects were told that their relatives had recalled all four incidents. They were asked to fill in the details of each incident or, if they couldn’t remember it, to write, “I do not remember this.” In follow-up interviews, they were asked to think more about each incident and to retrieve any additional details they could recall. Of the 24 people subjected to this procedure, six came to remember the fake story as true.

Because the stories were individualized by relatives who knew the subject, they contained enough specific details that evoke sense memories that were true and would validate the false part of the story:

You, your mom, Tien, and Tuan all went to the Bremerton K-Mart. You must have been 5 years old at the time. Your mom gave each of you some money to get a blueberry Icee. You ran ahead to get into the line first, and somehow lost your way in the store. Tien found you crying to an elderly Chinese woman. You three then went together to get an Icee.

There’s not a lot of vivid detail in this version of the story, but there’s just enough to bring the subject back to her child sensations and perceptions: going to a department store with her mother and her siblings as a very small child, a blueberry Icee, an elderly Chinese woman.  The subject who was told this story remembers going the Bremerton K-Mart with her family as a sensual experience: the immensity of the space, the aisles, the shelves of merchandize (brightly colored toys, gleaming appliances), the crowds of people all much taller than a five-year old, the sounds of people talking, the PA announcements (possibly for lost children), and finally, the taste of a blueberry Icee.

Loftus’ critics, and there are many of them, point out that a benign story with a happy ending is a far cry from a traumatic and scarring one of sexual abuse.  Additionally, as the Slate article describes, Loftus has used her research as a basis for therapists to implant false memories on purpose in order to alter their patients’ behavior in some desirable way.  To many of her peers, and to me, she has crossed over an ethical line in a very frightening way.  Her little recipe has become a cookbook for brainwashing.

Ethical concerns about what trusted professionals do with this knowledge aside, Loftus’s research into the delicate nature of memory has a lot to say about how we read and experience fiction and how we write it.  The conflation of sense memory and affective memory, which we bring as readers and writers, with fictional characters and experiences creates vivid false memories.

What ties us all together is the fundamental fact that all of us feel sensations and experience emotions in the same way.  One of the finest examples of a writer connecting with his reader through the five basic senses can be found in the opening paragraphs of Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point.”  This story is about a fourteen year-old boy desperately trying to escort a drunken middle aged women home from a party.  It’s not necessarily an experience that many of us have had, but D’Ambrosio makes it real for us from the very beginning by communicating with us through our senses:

I had been lying awake after my nightmare, a nightmare in which Father and I bought helium balloons at circus.  I tied mine around my finger and Father tied his around a stringbean and lost it.  After that, I lay in the dark, tossing and turning, sleepless from all the sand in my sheets and all the uproar in the living room.  Then the door opened, and for a moment the blade of bright light blinded me.  The party was still going full blast, and now with the door ajar and my eyes adjusting I glimpsed the silver smoke swirling in the light and all the people suspended in it, hovering around as if they were angels in Heaven—some kind of Heaven where the host serves highballs and the men smoke cigars and the women all smell like rotting fruit.  Everything was hysterical out there—the men laughing, the ice clinking, the women shrieking.  A woman crossed over and sat on the edge of my bed, bending over me.  It was Mother.  She was backlit, a vague looming silhouette, but I could smell lily of the valley and something else—lemon rind from the bitter twist she always chewed when she reached the watery bottom of her vodka-and-tonic.  When Father was alive, she rarely drank, but after he shot himself you could say she really let herself go.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then any one of the other senses – smell, touch, sound, taste — is worth a thousand pictures, and they transcend age, gender, and sometimes even culture.  From the sensation of the sand in the sheets, to sounds of the party in the next room, to the bitter twist and the watery vodka-and-tonic (combining both smell and taste), we are experiencing what young Kurt is experiencing and he is reaching us on a very visceral, non-verbal level.  He has no need to explain to us how he feels.  The sensations unconsciously evoke  our own sense memories and we simply feel what Kurt feels.  Having so firmly established this sensual connection with us, D’Ambrosio can now take us wherever he wants to go, just like Loftus’s test subject fondly remembering the taste of her  blueberry Icee.

This conflation of vivid sense memory and imagined narrative is how writers approach their craft and how, as readers, we experience books and stories rather than just merely read them.  We may have nothing at all in common with the author except for the simple fact that we inhabit human bodies and experience sensations and emotions in the same way.  In their simplest and most basic form, they pierce through everything that might separate us from one another: culture, time, place, language, and gender.

Sense memories, Rockaway Playland, 1969: the sting of sunburned cheeks, the roar of the rollercoaster overhead, the taste of hot dogs and cotton candy, the smell of the Atlantic Ocean and English Leather.

Books referenced:

See larger image Atonement: A Novel (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $5.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date February 25, 2003.

See larger image A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (Paperback) By (author) Ernest Hemingway List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $8.88 In Stock Used from: $9.14 In Stock Release date July 20, 2010.

See larger image The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (Paperback) By (author) Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, Katherine Ketcham List Price: $16.99 USD New From: $4.00 In Stock Used from: $1.49 In Stock

See larger image The Point: And Other Stories (Paperback) By (author) Charles D'Ambrosio List Price: $15.99 USD New From: $14.33 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

A few days after I posted The Art of the Novella: Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, my brief précis and commentary on Saul Bellow’s 1957 novella, I received an email from an old friend complimenting the piece, but also with an admonishment about my somewhat narrow view of what literature is all about.  Tommy Wilhem’s fight against the abyss, a common theme throughout the history of western literary tradition, from Odysseus to Bloom (Leopold), is certainly one of the major themes of the book, but, as my friend Maria pointed out to me, it is a theme largely owned by middle and upper class white men.  It is one of the dominant themes of western literature largely because western literary canon has always been, and to a large extent still is, defined by Dead White European Males.  Battling the abyss is a luxury of the privileged and empowered.  Literature created by women and minorities, she pointed out, tends to be about more immediate and worldly challenges  –  poverty, discrimination, subjugation — human experiences not common to privileged white men, dead or otherwise.  Essentially, she was telling me as politely as possible, “Fred, your Updikean life in suburbia has made your brain go soft,  you need to get out more.”

This discussion has been going on, or raging, between us for nearly thirty years.  When we met in the English department of SUNY Albany there was a heated battle going on there, and in colleges and universities everywhere for that matter, over literary canon.  There were the traditionalists, the old guard, who defended the traditional curriculum defined by Dead White European Males, plus a few tokens: Austin, Bronte, Wharton.  On the other side were those who thought that literary canon itself was oppressive, excluding not only women, but anyone of color.  There were extremes on both sides of the argument.  On the establishment side there were those who didn’t think anything written after 1850 was literature at all,  On the other side, feminist professors who interpreted every piece of accepted literature as misogynist, no matter what it was about.(“It’s about a 19th century whaling ship with an all male crew, for Pete’s sake!” “See! That proves my point!“).  While my own proclivities were with the traditionalists, middle class white male and Bloom (Harold) acolyte that I was, I believed that the canon should be more inclusive of lesser heard voices.  I didn’t want to trash it, I thought it should be expanded.

Initially, I wasn’t aware of this academic battle.  My high school honors English curriculum had been classic canon: a year of Greek, a year of British, a year of American, plus a smattering of other western European white guys.  The curriculum was the curriculum and I didn’t question it.  The political lines gradually revealed themselves over time.  In discussions with certain professors, you could earn a disdainful gaze by mentioning a modern woman or a black writer.  With other professors you would get the look by making a reference to a dead white guy.  Bringing up Vonnegut was like throwing a knuckleball at either side.  You never knew what it would do.  He was obviously a white guy, but at the time some considered him vulgar and he had once written science fiction, so both sides had reasons to hate him.   Vonnegut considered himself a descendant of Twain, who has also been accused of vulgarity.  Time has been shifting critical opinion favorably for both of them.

There was one person who was capable of bridging this gap.  Professor Tom Smith, who combined sheer brilliance,  the soul of a poet, and an exuberant generosity of spirit, endeared himself everyone.  It was through him that I was introduced to Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  These were entirely new voices to me, revealing human experiences that until then, in my white American maleness, had simply been invisible, to borrow a theme from Ellison.  I didn’t forsake Updike for these new, exotic voices — our common religious, cultural,  and socio-economic background is impossible to escape — but I did learn that the breadth of human experience is much larger than any of us can individually ever know.  My Telemachus-Stephan Dedalus complex had always made reading a search for my self.  Now it was a search for other other selves, very different and very far away from middle-class Queens.

History is written by the victors, and so it is true of the western literary tradition that we have inherited.  The winners, the powerful, the privileged, the male,  get to tell their tales. The vanquished, the enslaved, the women, not so much.   When I was sixteen years old, and reading The Iliad for the first time, I was enthralled by how such an ancient story could captivate me.  Across the centuries, from an ancient culture, the characters came alive for me.  In spite of the distance of time and culture, their desires and emotions were immediately recognizable.  Stories driven by character and desire are the trademark of western literature, no matter how intricate plots may or may not be.  All of the events in The Iliad are triggered by the “ruinous rage” of Achilles, who has had his consort, Briseis, taken from him by a more powerful social superior, Agamemnon.  Achilles takes his revenge by refusing to fight, essentially taking his ball and going home.  Although we are assured that Achilles loves Briseis, his anger is as much about the humiliation of being stripped of a prized possession as it is about his heartbreak.  Of course, since I was sixteen at the time, fueled by romantic notions and lust I had conjured up visions of Briseis as some sort of 1100 BC incarnation of Linda Ronstadt (it was the seventies and few were objectified by sixteen year-old boys more than Linda Ronstadt).

It’s not necessarily  fair to apply modern sensibilities to ancient texts, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid.  Briseis, no matter how much Achilles loved her, was nothing more than property, an enslaved tribute awarded to him for a well-fought battle.  In spite of the fact that the poet seeks inspiration from female muses, this story is told from a decidedly male point of view.  How Briseis feels about the situation is entirely irrelevant.  Her role in the larger story is that of a prop.  In modern parlance, she is a sex-slave.

One shouldn’t judge this too harshly because the status of women in Homer’s epic accurately portrays their status as property during time of the Trojan War (1100BC), the time Homer wrote in down (700 BC) and most of the two thousand plus years since then.  Judgment, however, is beside the point.  It is what is missing from western literary canon that is the issue.  There may have been female poets in ancient times, and in medieval times, but either through suppression or simply by academic selection, they are lost to us.  Most of the handful of woman writers who have been enshrined in western literary canon had to publish under male pseudonyms.

As it has been for women, it has been much the same for all of those who have been disenfranchised.  Native Americans and African Americans have been subsumed by a culture, whose literary tradition is driven by character and desire, that historically has deemed their own character and desire irrelevant and invisible.

If reading and literature is really all about sharing and understanding the full range of human experience, then it needs to be about sharing and understanding all of it. It needs to be not just about lives spent the abyss,  but also about lives lived under physical and metaphorical shackles and chains.

See larger image Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetrology: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest (Hardcover) By (author) John Updike List Price: $35.00 USD New From: $18.60 In Stock Used from: $12.49 In Stock Release date October 17, 1995.

See larger image The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (Paperback) By (author) Harold Bloom List Price: $20.00 USD New From: $8.40 In Stock Used from: $1.28 In Stock

See larger image Song of Solomon (Oprah's Book Club) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Toni Morrison List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $0.01 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date February 1, 1998.

See larger image Invisible Man (Paperback) By (author) Ralph Ellison List Price: $15.95 USD New From: $8.99 In Stock Used from: $2.19 In Stock Release date March 14, 1995.

See larger image Go Tell It on the Mountain (Paperback) By (author) James Baldwin List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $5.50 In Stock Used from: $4.06 In Stock Release date June 13, 2000.

See larger image One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) (Paperback) By (author) Gabriel Garcia Marquez List Price: $14.99 USD New From: $6.84 In Stock Used from: $2.49 In Stock Release date February 21, 2006.

See larger image The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation (Paperback) By (author) Homer List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $4.50 In Stock Used from: $2.24 In Stock

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Nathan’s autobiographical short stories have upset his family, particularly his father, who believes they show American-Jewish family life in a bad light and confirm the worst stereotypes of Jews.  It is 1956 and Nathan is writing in the shadow of the Holocaust.  His family is offended by his telling of their internal feuds, portraying them as “conniving Jews,” confirming the worst stereotypes held by Gentiles.  They enlist a respected member of their community, a judge no less, for his opinion.  Nathan receives a letter from the judge asking him, among other things,  “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?”  Strong stuff.  Nathan, however, is devoted more than anything to truthfulness and art and refuses to take responsibility for the feelings of his family and to take on the weight of history which they are trying to impose upon him.

Estranged from his father, he seeks out a substitute in one Emanual Lonoff, a successful, middle-aged Jewish-American writer.  Citing his published stories and his magazine profile, he writes to Lonoff,  inviting himself because he happens to be in the neighborhood staying at a writer’s colony in upstate New York.  His girlfriend has left him, his family questioning his morals, he seeks the approval from a spiritual father, a fellow writer.  He gets far more than he bargained for.

Lonoff lives a quiet life in The Berkshires with his wife of thirty-five years, Hope.  Also visiting on the same weekend as Nathan is is the beautiful but mysterious Amy Bellette, Lonoff’s former student.  There is tension in the house.  While never explicitly stated, it is more than hinted at that Bellette is a former lover of Lonoff’s.  There are no doubts about in long suffering Hope’s mind.

Lonoff receives Nathan warmly, but still holds him at arm’s length.  The wisdom and affirmation that Nathan is seeking is meted out in tiny doses.  Like the writing that Nathan admires, Lonoff’s words are spare and while as an artist he reveals truths fearlessly, in life he is guarded.  He describes his approach to writing:

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

Given Nathan’s romantic notions at the time about the noble cause of literature and art, that’s a little disappointing.  And yet, that’s pretty much what writing is.  For Hope, however, this describes her life with Lonoff as one of enforced solitude, and she’s had about enough of it.  That, along with the presence of Amy, brings about a crisis in the marriage and a confrontation that Nathan gets to witness.

Nathan, in the meantime, has fallen in love with Miss Ballette, or at least who he imagines her to be, none other than Anne Frank.  Her age is right, her look is right, and her background is unknown.  If only she would marry him, he could take revenge on his critics who attack his anti-Semitism.  Sadly, she is only Amy, not Anne, and well he tells her she looks like Anne Frank, she reacts with indifference.

The life Lonoff lives, devoted to his art, just as Nathan desires for himself, is not without its costs. The costs are paid not just by the writer, but also by the people in his life.  In the end, at the end of the tumultuous weekend, Lonoff’s knowing evaluation of Nathan is both praising of his talent but also a warning about the life he is choosing for himself:

“I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction. . . . You’re a different person.”

It’s impossible to read The Ghost Writer without thinking of Roth himself.  The setting of the story is in the same timeframe as when Roth’s career was beginning, at it was Roth’s unflinching portrayal, the the good and the not so good, of Jewish-American life that brought him both fame and controversy, first with Goodbye, Columbus, and then Portnoy’s Complaint.  The Ghost Writer was written on the other side of the fame and controversy and is imbued with the wisdom of a life having been lived.  The tone is genuinely wistful and, as a truth teller, Roth is willing to own up to the flaws, vanity, and shallowness of his twenty-three year-old self.  Among the larger themes of all of Roth’s work is the two-edged sword of heritage.   We are a nation of immigrants and while we attempt to purge ourselves from whatever identity that defines our ancestors, there are also times when the heritage that haunts is also the heritage that comforts us.  In The Ghost Writer, Roth shows us the birth of that dichotomy.

The Ghost Writer was selected by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the prize in 1980, but the Pulitzer committee overrode the decision and instead gave the award to Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.  It’s hard to imagine two books more different in style, subject and sheer heft.  Thirty years later, it’s hard to say anything about the comparative merits of the two books other than, “Wow, what year that was.”

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

See larger image The Ghost Writer (Paperback) By (author) Philip Roth List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $7.45 In Stock Used from: $2.61 In Stock Release date August 1, 1995.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

My titles are available for free using coupon code SW100. (Valid now through July 31, 2010).

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Tamkin’s council and Wilhelm’s inability to shed his burdens only serve to heighten Wilhelm’s sense of failure.  Wherever he seeks sympathy, whether it be his estranged wife who continues to make financial demands on him while refusing to divorce him or his father, a comfortably retired doctor, finds nothing but reminders of his failures.

Born Wilhelm Adler, he changes his name to Tommy Wilhelm to further his acting career.  His career never takes off and so he fails in his attempt to actually become Tommy Wilhelm, a failure he is constantly reminded of by his father who insists on addressing him as “Wilky,” his childhood name.

Seize the Day is a distinctly American story.  Whereas British fiction from Daniel Defoe on up through today’s Ian McEwan is preoccupied by social and economic class distinctions, American society prides itself on being free from class.  No matter what station we are born into, we believe that through hard work, perseverance, and strength of character we can succeed.  If we do not succeed, it is obviously due to some flaw in our character.  American fiction has always explored the chasm that exists between that Great American Ideal (and mythology) and the stark reality that the Universe has no concept of fairness.  American literary characters, unlike their British counterparts, are therefore imbued with a greater sense of anomie. While British heroes and heroines may struggle to overcome the rigid class distinctions in their society, and usually fail, there is at least the idea that there is a sense of order in the Universe, no matter how harsh it may be. American literary figures, from Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths to Fitzgerald’s James Gatz to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to Miller’s Willy Loman, fight not against society but against nothingness.

Years after writing Seize the Day, Bellow said in interviews that never liked Tommy Wilhelm very much.  Indeed, Wilhelm is not particularly likable and the reader is likely to feel as much sympathy for him as the other characters in the novella.  “Stop whining, be a man, get a job!” we want to say to him.  And yet, the story is compelling and unconsciously reaches those hidden parts of our psyche that fear the stark nothingness, and leads us to the novella’s surprisingly cathartic conclusion.

For more in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

Referenced books:

See larger image Seize the Day (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Saul Bellow List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $7.50 In Stock Used from: $3.50 In Stock Release date May 27, 2003.

See larger image An American Tragedy (Signet Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Theodore Dreiser List Price: $9.95 USD New From: $9.95 In Stock This title will be released on July 3, 2012.

See larger image The Great Gatsby (Paperback) By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $7.59 In Stock Used from: $1.56 In Stock Release date September 30, 2004.

See larger image The Catcher in the Rye (Paperback) By (author) J. D. Salinger List Price: $13.99 USD New From: $4.59 In Stock Used from: $2.68 In Stock

See larger image Death of a Salesman (Viking Critical Library) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Arthur Miller List Price: $18.00 USD New From: $7.99 In Stock Used from: $3.97 In Stock Release date January 1, 1996.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

This essay was originally published three years ago in Seeker Magazine.  When I began writing it, my only intent was to document a family story that was going to be forever lost due to the passage of time.  As what sometimes happens when writing personal essays, they start out about one thing, but in the process of writing them, they turn out to be about something else.  In this case, I discovered, over twenty years after they were gone, the impact my grandparents had on the person I became.

Tomorrow, Christmas Day, 2009, a new epilogue to this essay.

My grandparents, John and Frieda Bubbers, or “Oma” and “Opa,” came to America some time after World War I. Opa had been a soldier during the war and for a brief period after the war was over, during the social and economic chaos that was Germany during that time, he had been a police officer. He never spoke much about those experiences, but when he was in Astoria General, near the end of his life, he struggled and had to be restrained when the nurses attempted to place an oxygen mask over his face. He was having flashbacks of trenches and gas masks.

The young couple settled in a small German community in Lawrence, Massachusetts, probably around 1920 or 1921. He never told me what he did for a living, but I imagine that he worked in the textile mills that were still operating all over the northeast at the time. During my time with Computer Associates, a software company based on Long Island, I traveled quite frequently to our office in Andover, just a few miles from Lawrence. I took several trips to Lawrence and saw a poverty stricken area that didn’t seem to have ever recovered from the great depression; the mills still standing like red brick carcasses, crumbling, abandoned and overgrown for over fifty years.

My father once gave me an address and I found the house they had lived in, a non-descript three story dump where they rented a flat on the top floor. I took a picture of it for my father and thought that the place might have fit in anywhere the working poor live in the northeast. It could have been Troy, it could have been Yonkers, it could have been Bridgeport, or it could have been Hamilton Street in Albany.  To my father’s surprise, it hadn’t changed in fifty years.

My uncle Johnny was born around 1921 in Lawrence and my father was born in 1930, also in Lawrence.

The depression was devastating to places like Lawrence. The mills closed down for what turned out to be forever and destroyed their fragile economies. It was during this time that my grandparents decided to move back to Germany. I never got the chance to ask them as an adult what made them make what they later admitted to be the biggest mistake of their lives, but all I have are the memories of what they told me when I was a child. For whatever reason, in 1935 they moved back to Hamburg.

They did tell me that within days of arriving “home”, they had realized their mistake. Opa, visiting some old friends at a police station heard, “John, go back to America. Get your sons out of Germany.” Indeed, my uncle, aged fourteen, was in grave danger, first of being “recruited” in to the Hitler Youth, and then into the Army. Everyone in Germany knew that war, and disaster, was coming. My grandparents had been born in Germany, so their sons’ US citizenship meant little to The Third Reich, and after Opa’s experience in The Great War, he wasn’t going to let that happen to either of his sons.

This story was told to me many times by both my father and by Oma. My father’s version is one of excitement and adventure, the kind of thing that thrills the five year old boy that he was at the time. He never seemed to understand that his older brother could very well have been senselessly slaughtered fighting on the side of evil or that he himself might have been incinerated when the allies firebombed Hamburg.  Oma’s version, however, is a little darker. The last time she told me this story I might have been about thirteen or fourteen, so I think the truth of what they must have felt is more frightening than she was willing to tell me at the time.

It took my family some eighteen months to finally be together again in America. Opa worked double shifts in factories for about a year to earn enough money to return to the United States. He headed to New York City to find work and to prepare a place for Oma and the two boys when they arrived.

In the meantime, my father and my uncle got to experience both the gifts and the punishments of a classical German education. I remember my father proudly showing me his German composition book containing his writing exercises, written with the most exquisitely beautiful and precise penmanship I’ve ever seen, particularly astounding when I realize that it was done by a five year old boy who had learned German as a second language just six months before. My father told me it was the product of both high standards of excellence as well as canings on knuckles and buttocks from the stern schoolmaster.

When Opa had finally sent enough money back to Oma, it was time for them to join him in New York. They took the train from Hamburg down to Genoa, Italy and from there sailed to New York. My father’s account of this trip is the romantic vision of a small boy, riding on a train, seeing Italy, boarding the huge ocean liner. Oma’s story about traveling south on the train, a mother with her two sons, trying to keep the youngest one from innocently telling their story to fellow passengers, passing through checkpoint after checkpoint and having documents scrutinized, is a little more scary.

I can’t pretend that their experience matches the sheer terror of what it must have been like for the many thousands of other people who were fleeing Germany at the time; they were, after all, “pure” Germans. They were still, however, fleeing fascists and fearing for their lives and futures. It is a state of fear that I can hardly imagine myself enduring.

The experience seems to have been particularly traumatic for my uncle. These days, we hardly think of fourteen and fifteen year old boys as “men”, but back then in that time and place, he surely must have felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, feeling that he was the protector of his mother and young brother as the three of them made their way south among all the other refugees.

At my mother’s funeral several years ago, I saw my cousin, Marian, for the first time since we had both become adults with children of our own. She asked me if my father had ever spoken about Germany. I told her that he had quite often and that Oma had told me about it too. Marian, her sister Susan and her brother Eric, had never heard much about it; their father never talked about it when they were growing up, and they hadn’t been able to spend as much time with Oma and Opa as my sisters and I had. She told me that her father, now in his late seventies, had just begun to talk about it in halting, sketchy terms. I spent some time with her and told her the things I could remember. I’m afraid my poorly remembered version of the story told her little about her father’s life-shaping experience.

My grandfather managed to get a factory job in Astoria, Queens and had found a place for them to live on Corona Avenue in Elmhurst. In return for being the superintendent, he had an apartment in the basement of a small apartment building. Being a super in a building in those days was a bit more work than it is now: keeping the hallways and stairwells sparkling clean, installing screen windows in the spring, replacing them with glass storm windows in the fall, keeping the coal furnace in the basement burning through the winter. My father helped him in these tasks as Opa found whatever other work he could in order to make ends meet.

My grandparents lived in that building for the rest of their lives. When Opa was superintendent they lived in that basement apartment while the two boys found what jobs they could while pursuing their educations; my father became a pharmacist, my uncle an audio engineer. Later, after the boys were grown up and moved out, Oma and Opa moved to an apartment on the fourth floor. It was large enough for the two of them to live comfortably as well as entertain guests. There was a living room, a dining room, a bedroom and a small kitchen. Oma served a Christmas Eve dinner for my family every year consisting of homemade potato salad and several varieties of German sausages and cured meats.

The bedroom had an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline. When I was a small boy, Opa would give me a pair of binoculars and I would scan the distant skyscrapers for hours, silhouetted against the orange and red sky at dusk with the last rays of the sun glinting off the stainless steel crown of the Chrysler Building, and on into the evening when the lights of the Empire State Building and the Pan Am Building fascinated me.

After the war, in the late 1940’s, Opa had managed to scrape together enough money to buy a small cottage in Stony Brook, out in what was at the time, the distant reaches of the north shore of Long Island. A few years later he was able to buy the lot in back of the cottage creating a large wooded property with pretty gardens in front and on two sides of the house. In back of the house was a large lawn, shaded all summer long by towering oak trees.

It was a small, inexpensively constructed house that he improved over the years: excavating out a full basement, replacing the beaverboard walls with sheetrock, adding wood paneling to the living room, and adding a lovely sun parlor to the side that caught the afternoon sun. There was only one “official bedroom”, so a large dining room table was placed in the living room and the dining room was turned into a bedroom with a huge, in the eyes of a small child, maple bed and matching furniture: nightstands, a small table and lamp, a dresser and several well-stocked book cases. The sofa in the sun parlor opened up to a king sized bed as well.

There was enough room in the house for all six of their grandchildren, some by themselves, others paired by relative age, to take turns spending time each summer with Oma and Opa, going to the beach on most days, but sometimes fishing off the pier in the village or taking a drive in Opa’s Chevy to Montauk or Shelter Island. To me, this little cottage seemed a million miles away from the sidewalk on Corona Avenue back in Elmhurst. The air was fresh and clean, some mornings faintly carrying the salty scent of the Long Island Sound, and crickets and owls sang all through the night.

When my father bought the drugstore a few doors down from the apartment building, Opa retired and went to work for him. He dusted and stocked shelves and made deliveries, first using his own car, and then when my father was able to afford it, a specially painted Volkswagen beetle:

Newtown Pharmacy

Free Delivery

HAvemeyer 4-3000

During the summer, my father would hire a teenager for making the deliveries and Opa would spend July and August in Stony Brook with Oma, hosting the grandchildren as we rotated through. When I was old enough, I got the summer job, first riding all over Queens to make deliveries on a bicycle and then, after I got my license, the famously painted Volkswagen. The girls I dated in high school eventually got used to sitting at night in a car that stood out among the others parked alongside a small park near a Long Island Railroad overpass.

During the years that Opa worked for my father, a special bond formed between them. Opa was, I believe, my father’s closest friend in the world. As my teenage years progressed, my relationship with my father became strained and distant and we were never completely reconciled. I have always been envious of the relationship that my father had with his father.

My cousins lived in Huntington on Long Island. Oma and Opa were equally kind and generous and loving to all of their grandchildren, but because my sisters and I lived next door to them in the city most of the year, we got to spend more time with them. As the youngest of all the grandchildren, and the most spoiled, I probably got the most exclusive time with them.

When I was very young, Opa would stop by early in the morning on his way home from the deli with fresh breakfast rolls to bring me up to the apartment to have breakfast with him and Oma: orange juice, rolls with whipped butter and jelly, tea with milk and honey, and fruit. When I started school, I visited them in the afternoon when Oma would have afternoon cake and chilled leftover tea, again with milk and honey. I would spend a few hours with Oma until it was time for me to go home for dinner.

Oma, as everyone who knew her will remember her, was always a “Lady.” She was always dressed tastefully in dresses that she made herself. She spoke gracefully, as if she were a member of gilded age society. The rest of us were amused by this and teased her sometimes, thinking that she was trying to put on airs because we did, after all, live in the middle of middle-class Queens, and we had the accents to prove it. She did, however, have a good sense of humor, at least when it came to tolerating her youngest grandson’s childish pranks.

While Opa was a very quiet man who always retained a very strong German accent, Oma was very talkative and had barely a trace of an accent. To this day, I cannot understand how it was that this woman who came to America in her twenties and learned English as a second language could speak such grammatically perfect English with hardly any accent. At some point she may have taken lessons, because I remember her once asking me if I was studying “elocution” in school. I had to ask her what “elocution” meant. The one thing that she always had problems with was the “ch” sound which she could never do; it would always come out as “sh”. I used to play a game with her where I would say, “Oma, do you remember the name of that movie you took me to see? The one with the magic car?”

“Shitty Shitty Bang Bang,” she would reply, and then get flustered and scold me. I now realize that after the first twenty or thirty times I did that, she probably caught on and was play acting with me just so she could hear the scrawny little boy with the short pants and crew-cut laughing hysterically. So much for Oma putting on airs.

And she could talk. It became an in-joke in the family that you could have a conversation with Oma and not have to say a word for the first hour.

It was during those afternoons that Oma would tell me stories. The very first one I remember her telling me was “Hansel and Gretel” while I looked at illustrations through a tiny window in the back of a small plastic toy Bavarian cottage, clicking on the chimney to advance to the next picture.

As I got older, she tailored the stories to my age. Since they were from Hamburg, their apartment was decorated with pictures and mementos from the German city. There were several small nick nacks depicting Hummel. When I asked her about them, she told me the story of Hummel, the ill-tempered water carrier who was taunted by children who cried “Hummel Hummel”. Poor Hummel couldn’t chase them because he was weighed down by the water he was carrying so he would reply, “Mors mors,” a low-German phrase loosely translated as “asses, asses.”

Many years later, after both Oma and Opa were gone, one of Opa’s younger brothers came to visit America for the very first time and stayed with my parents. He was in his seventies and spoke no English. He seemed both surprised and disappointed that none of my father’s children knew German and that my father had to act as a translator. When he asked again, through my father, “No German at all?” I replied “Mors Mors.” With that, the old man’s face lit up with joy and he leapt across the room, pulled me out of my chair, and kissed me on the lips. It’s a Hamburg thing.

Oma told me the story of her trip out of Germany with my father and uncle many times. When I first heard it, I was quite young and her story was probably told the way my father remembered it: an exciting adventure. Gradually, as I got older, she added in more of the frightening aspects of the story.

She also told me about the sinking of the Titanic, about how she heard about it as a little girl in Germany when it happened. She told me about Scott’s expedition in Antarctica, followed by Richard Byrd’s flight over the South Pole.

I was captivated by her stories and asked her to tell them to me over and over again. None, however, captivated me as much as the story of Lindbergh’s flight over the Atlantic in 1927. She told me how no one had believed that a man could fly solo for so many hours and find his way across the unforgiving north Atlantic to Paris, but Lindbergh, through courage and conviction, had proven them all wrong. She was able to talk for hours about it as I eagerly listened to it again and again. She told me that when I was old enough, she would give me the book that Lindbergh himself had written and I could read it all for myself.

That day came when I was about ten or eleven years old and I was staying with them for my annual turn out in Stony Brook. In addition to finally being able to go out on the big fishing boat from Captree State Park on the south Shore with Opa, as my older cousin Eric had once done, she finally presented me with the book.

On the first night in the sun parlor, with the crickets singing outside the window screens, and after several games each of Clue and Parcheesi, Oma handed me her copy of Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis. It was a huge intimidating book for me, but every night I climbed up onto the big maple framed bed that dwarfed me with Lindbergh’s book in my hand. I struggled reading it, but by the end of my two weeks that summer in Stony Brook, I had completed it. On the final Sunday afternoon while Opa was putting my suitcase in his car for my trip back to Elmhurst, I attempted to hand the book back to Oma. She pushed it back to me and told me that it was mine to keep.

For many years, Oma and Opa had been members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and they were voracious readers. Although he was very quiet and usually let Oma do all the talking, my memories of those nights in Stony Brook include the picture of Opa sitting in the corner of the living room in his rocking chair, reading a book or a magazine while Oma played board games with me and told me stories in the sun parlor. He rocked very slightly in the chair as his eyes focused intently through his reading glasses. In later years he would also use a large, square framed magnifying glass.

Starting with The Spirit of St. Louis, Oma would periodically give me books to read, each time turning them into gifts that didn’t need to be returned. Finally, when I was a college-bound senior in High School, she said “Take any books you want, they are all yours.”

As my teenage years progressed, my interests diverged from what seemed to be the only acceptable field for my generation in my family: medicine. My relationship with the rest of my family, particularly my father, was a disaster, and there were times when I wondered how I could be such an oddball in this family that was producing medical professionals. Throughout all this, Oma flew in under the radar and nurtured my interest in literature. The books she gave me during those years included Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring, Marchette Chute’s Shakespeare of London, Collected Short Stories of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, and several volumes of Shakespeare, organized into tragedies and comedies.

I have a book entitled The Hemingway Reader next to me on my desk as I write this essay. It contains the complete text of The Torrents of Spring, The Sun Also Rises, eleven short stories, selections from five other novels, and selections from non-fiction works on Spain and Africa. On the blank page facing the inside cover is an inscription, hand written in a fine slightly Germanic looking script:

John & Frieda Bubbers

1953

Every book that Oma gave to me was so inscribed, with both their names and the year the book was acquired. At some point in time The Book-Of-The-Month Club, in cooperation with Scribner’s, sold a matched set of Fitzgerald and Hemingway novels. Each book has a blue hardcover and a black spine. Titles on the spines are embossed in silver and the author’s names in gold. Oma and Opa only had a few of these volumes. Over the years, I looked in used book stores, gradually filling out my collection. On one happy day when I was in college, I found both a Gatsby and a Farewell to Arms in a musty old used book store on Pearl Street in Albany. These books aren’t of much value, the ones I purchased that day were about two dollars apiece, but they are the two authors who matter the most to me, and my collection began with a gift from Oma and Opa. The completed set now sits on the mantle above the fireplace in my den.

When my sisters, my mother, and I were preparing for my father’s funeral, we were pulling out all the old family photo albums to use the pictures to decorate the funeral parlor. Here and there in the photos we found pictures from long past holidays where both Oma and Opa were present along with my father, my uncle and all my cousins. The pictures are striking. First of all, there’s the abundance of blond hair and blue eyes, blond enough and blue enough that I’m sure to have given tsoris to the grandmother of one of my old girlfriends. Even more striking, however are the physical features that you can see in all of us who have descended from Oma and Opa. A geneticist could use these photographs as lecture aids. My father resembles Oma. My uncle resembles Opa, although he still has some of Oma’s features. My sister Judy and my cousin Marion look like Oma. My cousin Eric and I look like Opa. My daughter Caroline looks like Judy, my father, and Oma. We do, in fact, have photographs of Caroline, Judy and my father each at about the age of five or six. With my father’s girlish blond hair style that mothers of all generations to like to inflict on their little boys, the children in all of these pictures from different generations look identical.

Opa died after a long battle with cancer when I was a sophomore in college. The protracted illness that had slowly killed Opa had been particularly difficult for my father and the death of his closest friend hit him very hard, heightening the disappointment he felt with me. At the time, I was away at college majoring in everything except pre-med. Oma died of a sudden heart attack several years later.

Years later, I now have questions for them that can never be answered. What was it that sent them back to Germany? Was it simply poverty, or was it more? How frightening was it for Oma without her husband, shepherding her two sons south to Italy and back to freedom? By the time I was born, they had completely embraced America. Opa went to visit Germany just once in the 1970’s and Oma never left America again after those eighteen months in Germany in the 30’s. She voted Republican in every single election from Eisenhower to Reagan.

The biggest mystery of all is the collection of books. There is a significant amount of Hemingway and Faulkner in this collection. The Hemingway is understandable. His writing style and subject matter crosses all cultural barriers and he is still one of the most popular writers of English around world. What I can’t understand is how a woman who was raised in Germany, who came to America in her twenties, and who learned English at the same age, could both tackle and embrace Faulkner. Reading Faulkner is not for lightweights and I doubt that these books were ever default selections for the book club. The contents page of The Collected Stories of William Faulkner as very faint checkmarks next to each item. The inscription on the book tells me they acquired it in 1953, after their sons had both been married and moved out; not that I can imagine either of them reading a book by Faulkner they didn’t have to. How I wish I could ask Oma what she thought of “A Rose for Emily.” It is only now that she has been gone for almost twenty-five years that I realize that she must have possessed a finely tuned ear for language and a love for literature and ideas.

Oma and Opa quietly lived a literary life, unnoticed by everyone but their youngest grandson to whom they gave their most precious gift: an enduring love of stories.

Tomorrow: Gifts Epilogue: Christmas 1979

See larger image The Spirit of St. Louis (Paperback) By (author) Charles A. Lindbergh List Price: $20.00 USD New From: $12.72 In Stock Used from: $1.76 In Stock Release date November 25, 2003.

See larger image To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Harper Lee List Price: $15.99 USD New From: $5.84 In Stock Used from: $0.75 In Stock Release date May 23, 2006.

See larger image Silent Spring (Paperback) By (author) Rachel Carson List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $6.09 In Stock Used from: $3.14 In Stock

© 2009 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.