Snow in August (42 page)

In addition, I’m indebted to Leo Rosten’s two American classics,
The Joys of Yiddish
and
Hooray for Yiddish!
They are a marvelous mixture of scholarship and humor and should be taught in our public schools. While writing this book,
I also read, learned from, and drew upon
Yiddish Proverbs
, edited by Hanan J. Ayalti;
Anglish/Yinglish: Yiddish in American Life and Literature
, by Gene Bluestein;
The Meaning of Yiddish
, by Benjamin Harshaw; and
Words Like Arrows: A Treasury of Yiddish Folk Sayings
, compiled by Shirley Kumove. They have all
contributed to the task of keeping alive this amazingly vital and supple language, and they fed the inspiration for this novel.

My readings in Jewish mysticism included
Kabbalah for the Layman
(volumes I, II, and III), by Rabbi Philip S. Berg;
The Essential Kabbalah
, by Daniel C. Matt; and
From the World of the Cabbalah
, by Ben Zion Bokser. I heard many tales of the Golem during a visit to Prague, but also read
The Golem
, by Chaim Bloch (translated from German by Harry Schneiderman); the detailed and scholarly
Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid
, by Moshe Idel; and various essays by Gershom Scholem. I urge these works upon interested readers, along with a marvelous
book called
Magic Prague
, by Angelo Maria Ripellino, translated by David Newton Marinelli.

—P.H.

1. Snow in August
   starts like a modern-day fairy tale, with the phrase “Once upon a cold and luminous morning, in an urban hamlet of tenements,
   factories, and trolley cars on the western slopes of the borough of Brooklyn, a boy named Michael Devlin woke in the dark.”
   In what other ways does the author use fairy tale elements, and why do you think he does so?
   
2. Heroes and villains, both real and imaginary, are a significant part of Michael’s life. What does he learn about heroism in
   the course of the book? Does his hero worship help or hinder him? Do you think that heroes are necessary in our lives? Do
   you think children today have fewer heroes available to them than Michael does in 1946?
   
3. One of Michael’s greatest worries in
   Snow in August
   is whether or not to tell the police about Frankie McCarthy
   beating up Mister G. Michael’s mother says that informers are the “scum of God’s sweet earth,” but Rabbi Hirsch tells him,
   “You keep quiet about some crime, it’s just as bad as the crime.” Do you agree with Kate Devlin or Rabbi Hirsch? Whom do you
   think the author agrees with?
   
4. Over the course of
   Snow in August
   , Michael learns Yiddish and Rabbi Hirsch learns English. Both of them are fascinated by the power of words, and ultimately
   Michael draws on their power to create the Golem. What does this suggest about the power of language? Do words still have
   power today?
   
5. The shadow of World War II and the Holocaust looms over
   Snow in August
   . Both Kate Devlin and Rabbi Hirsch have lost a spouse to the war. Are there ways in which Kate and Leah Yaretzky are similar?
   What about the Rabbi and Tommy Devlin?
   
6. The progress of Jackie Robinson’s first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers is a recurring motif in the novel. Why do Michael
   and the Rabbi follow his story so fervently? What do they learn from it?
   
7. Michael is often moved or inspired by the music of his time, from popular music to Dvo
   ák. How do the titles of these pieces
   reflect the themes in
   Snow in August?
   Is the radio just a conduit for the music, or do you think it has a wider significance?
   
8. Snow in August
   is a novel full of miraculous happenings. Were you surprised that Michael was able to re-create the Golem? Why do you think
   the author used miracles instead of more realistic events?
   

There are many valid ways to write novels, but I’m one of those countless writers who must begin with the rough material of
my own life. Like all human beings, I was shaped by the accidents of living in a special time and a particular place. The
time was as important as the place. I was born in the middle of the Depression, came to consciousness during the Second World
War, and lived my adolescence during the great optimistic years that followed the war. The place was Brooklyn, the largest
borough of New York City; a place suffused with a peculiar angular light, reflecting off the harbor; a place with hundreds
of churches, many libraries, a lovely park set in its heart, and a strand of beach at Coney Island. Some rich people lived
there, along with many families that came to be called middle class, but in its style, its toughness, its valor, Brooklyn
was proudly working class.

Each neighborhood was a separate urban hamlet, with its
own heroes, villains, and myths. My neighborhood, not far from Prospect Park, was a mixture of Irish and Italian immigrants
and their children, and a smaller number of Jews. The architecture was as jumbled as the classes: proud brownstones owned
by people who worked in the distant towers of Manhattan; cheaper one-family homes where clerks and ironworkers and newspaper
pressmen raised their families; and tenements that housed the poor, built with darkening red bricks and fire escapes zigzagging
on their faces like iron calligraphy.

We lived in a tenement. Our railroad flat had five rooms, but only one bedroom had a door. We were on the top floor, able
to survey the street on one end and see the skyline of New York from the other. We were not much different from all the others
who lived in the tenements: family was the essential core of our lives, and we lived most of that family life in the kitchen.
In the kitchen we ate and talked and listened. We did our homework at the kitchen table. We listened to the radio in the kitchen,
our imaginations crowded with Captain Midnight and Tom Mix and Terry and the Pirates, and then by the grave voices of Edward
R. Murrow and Gabriel Heatter, bringing news of distant battlefields. The kitchen door was never locked.

But there was a sense of extended family too. There were widening geographies in that neighborhood, extending from the flat
to the building to the block to the adjoining blocks and finally to the parish. We knew everyone in our building, their strengths
and weaknesses. On hot summer evenings, in those years before air conditioning, the grown-ups took folding chairs out to the
sidewalk in front of the building and
sipped iced tea and talked. They talked of everything: past, present, and future, people they knew and people they didn’t.
The immigrants talked about the Old Country. Sometimes a voice would rise in song. We knew the owners of every store along
the avenue. And though we did not think of them that way, we understood that there were some basic institutions: the Church,
the Bar, the Police Station. They represented stability and continuity. The bars were more than simple drinking establishments;
they were social clubs, places where men could drown their sorrows if a son was killed on some Pacific island, refuges from
all difficulties, hiring halls for men who had lost their jobs.

The great goal for working men was the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where two of my cousins worked, and where I would serve a year
as an apprentice sheet metal worker. A job at the Navy Yard was a civil service job, and that could last a lifetime. Because
of the Depression, the need for steady work was central to all of them, even the kids. I started working at eleven, after
school, delivering a newspaper called the
Brooklyn Eagle
. Other kids delivered groceries, shined shoes, washed windows, shoveled snow in wintertime. There was a general assumption
that working for money was more important than education; I didn’t meet anyone who had gone to college until I was in the
U.S. Navy. Most young men quit school at sixteen to go to work. Eventually, I did, too.

But if we were part of a parochial hamlet, there was another presence that bound us to all other parts of Brooklyn: the baseball
team called the Dodgers. We read the sports pages of the
Brooklyn Eagle
(and the other newspapers) as if they held the secrets
of all life. They were, in a religious sense, the fundamental texts. My father, an immigrant from Belfast in Northern Ireland,
became an American through those sports pages. If Jorge Luis Borges had known the Dodgers and those newsprint pages of heroic
deeds and invincible statistics, he might have written a story in which the texts invented us. They were part of the dailiness
of our lives, as were the games on the radio described with laconic exuberance by Red Barber. We were all so young we thought
that world would last forever.

By the end of the 1950s, everything was gone. The Dodgers were gone, the
Brooklyn Eagle
was gone, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard was dying. Red Barber had become the announcer for the hated Yankees. Television had
arrived, and so had heroin. Nobody sat outside anymore on summer evenings; they watched Ed Sullivan or Jerry Lewis or Sid
Caesar in the blue light of the television screens. The kitchens were abandoned; they had finally found a use for those living
rooms, and ate dinner on folding trays, sucked into the voracious tube. For the first time, as junkies began their restless
gnawing prowl, they locked their kitchen doors. You saw more and more moving vans in the neighborhood, heading for the distant
suburbs. I remember feeling, as did so many others, that the world I knew was gone forever.

This novel, like some of my other writings, is about that lost world. In that larger sense, it is, of course, autobiographical.
That is, I lived in that world, on those streets, with those people. To be sure, my father did not die in the war; his left
leg was amputated in 1927 after a terrible accident in a soccer game, and he worked in a war plant for the duration of the
war
and then in a factory across the street from where we lived. In 1947, I had two younger brothers and a younger sister. Michael
Devlin is me, and he is not me. But there are details in this novel that do come directly from life.

I was, for example, a Shabbos goy. That is, I was a Christian kid who on Saturday mornings would perform the small tasks that
were proscribed by a strict adherence to the laws against working on the Sabbath. I turned on the lights. I switched on the
gas in the stove. These were small things, but years later I realized their importance. By walking into that synagogue when
I was eleven, I was beginning the end of my own parochialism. I was literally walking out of the parish. Out of the life I
knew into a life I did not know. And that process began by crossing the street in the midst of a snowstorm.

For years, I wanted to write that story. There were abstract things I wanted to express, but I wanted them to live in a novel,
not be written in a tract. I wanted to acknowledge the great gifts that I, and all Americans, had received from the Jews:
tenacity, irony, moral intelligence. Starting in that synagogue, and then across a lifetime, I had been challenged, enriched,
illuminated by the men and women who had offered us those gifts. To grow up in New York after the war was to live in the shadow
of Jewish intellectual brilliance. Through books, articles, essays, fiction, poetry, and teaching, that amazing generation
of Jews, most of them educated in public universities, set the terms for American thought and sensibility. They also established
standards of excellence that would intimidate all the rest of us for many years to come.

One of those standards was about the insistence on moral intelligence.
It wasn’t enough to take a list of commandments in your hand and obey them; you had to
think
about them. This was essential to the children of other diasporas, because that era, for all the sunniness it retains in
our nostalgias, was also a time of unsettling darkness. We had to deal with McCarthyism and witch hunts. We had to think about
and understand and confront intolerance, in its crude forms and in its subtle ones. We had to understand racism, which for
white kids in the urban North remained something we heard about but never saw. Two momentous events forced us to think in
new ways, and both are in this novel. The first was experienced in the dark. In the late summer of 1945, when I was ten, I
sat in the RKO Prospect and saw for the first time the films from Buchenwald. I was horrified, and had nightmares for months,
awaking in fear and trembling, to be comforted by my mother. Those gray images of skeletal figures, of bony bodies stacked
upon each other like offal, of eyes staring from gaunt faces like silent accusations: they drove themselves deep into my mind
and my imagination. At school that fall, I asked the first moral questions of my life: How could this happen? Who did this?
How could we have let this happen? There were no adequate answers. There are none now.

The other was the arrival of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn. There were no black people in our neighborhood, other than a tall,
silent man who worked as a janitor in one of the large buildings near Prospect Park. We vaguely remembered hearing about race
riots in Harlem and Detroit in 1943, but that seemed long ago, back when we were seven or eight years old. We knew very little
about race or racism. It was never discussed
in school or on the radio. There were few blacks in the movies we saw on Saturday mornings, and these were usually comical
figures or “natives” in Tarzan films. There were no black heroes. There were no black villains. As Ralph Ellison would soon
make vivid to us, blacks were invisible men.