It is quite an undertaking to excavate our parents sorrow. To do so with a parent who has been through one of the worst tragedies in history, is something enormous. This was a fascinating experience for me to read about a man who I know only as a father to share what it is like for him, only as a son. The author’s son is a student at my school, and I have had the pleasure of having meetings with Jason and his wife (I really enjoy their son, too!). It’s a rare pleasure to get to experience the parents of our students as full people – that made this book, about a very personal experience for the author, a second sort of personal experience for me as a reader.
Schmuel’s Bridge, written by poet Jason Sommers, is the author’s attempt to save and share some of the stories of his aging father Jay, a Holocaust survivor. The elder Jay was born in Munkacs, in what is now Ukraine (a section of Eastern Europe where borders are often shifting, the intersection of Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, near Poland). Following a rough childhood that included an abusive father and anti-Semitic sentiments from people around him (as the author reminds us, anti-Semitism did not begin with the rise of Hitler alone), eventually he and an elder brother were sent to Csepel, a slave-labor camp where many Hungarian Jews were sent. Jay and his brother, separately, managed to escape that camp before they were potentially deported to Auschwitz, but many people in their family were not as lucky. Their younger brother, Schmuel/ Schmiel (or Samuel) was among those who was rounded up from a Jewish ghetto back in Hungary and placed on a train to Auschwitz. However, Schmuel made a choice – he managed to jump off the train on a bridge, and swam to shore – where he was shot by Nazi guards.
The story of Schmuel’s fate is something of a legend for Jason, who has been told his whole life that he looks like his uncle who he will never be able to meet. Jason has grown up around survivors, knows the careful etiquette around hearing their stories – but also has a much more personal reaction to them, having experienced caregivers who were dealing with the trauma as they were also raising children. In a very vulnerable way, he shows a great deal of empathy for his father and other survivors, even as that trauma comes to impact him, and creates a wedge that he longs to pry lose between him and his father.
The majority of the book is a description of a trip taken by the author and his father 20 years ago, when they traveled to various parts of Eastern Europe in an attempt to locate the specific bridge where Schmuel made his own fate. He writes with humor and honesty about flowing between fear of and desire for connection with his father. He describes his own rich interior reactions to powerful surroundings (the chapter on their visit to Auschwitz was particularly moving) while also speculating about the state of his father. He is aided in his writing by the videos he took on the trip – often, I wished that we as a reader could see more than the several still shots included throughout. Overall, this was a moving memoir.
Small Things Like These – I don’t want to say too much about it, because the dramatic tension (such as it is) rests on not really knowing what the protagonist will do to resolve his feelings. It is a heartwarming holiday book – and one that will likely only take an afternoon, at 116 quick pages. Although the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland are pretty well known now, and the scale of the atrocity is nothing compared to the Holocaust, I saw a sort of connection between these two books. The existence of forced labor could only take place because of what the communities around them allowed to happen, in both cases. This is a story about Bill Furlong, whose mother was unwed and never identified his father. Despite the social stigma of that (quite deep in Ireland in what I assume to be the 40s – 50s) he manages because his mother works for a wealthy woman who agrees to continue her employment, despite her unwed and pregnant status. He is raised in that house, and although he wants for some things physically he finds what he needs, and grows to be a man with a decent business, a wife and five daughters of his own. One Christmas season, his interactions bring him face to face with another reality, and he must consider what it means to be responsible for one another. It’s a small, quiet but powerful book.