Shmuel's Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with My Survivor Father

Jason Sommer

mar 2022 · Charlesbridge Publishing

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A moving memoir of a son’s relationship with his survivor father and of their Eastern European journey through a family history of incalculable loss.

Jason Sommer’s father, Jay, is ninety-eight years old and losing his memory. More than seventy years after arriving in New York from WWII-torn Europe, he is forgetting the stories that defined his life, the life of his family, and the lives of millions of Jews who were affected by Nazi terror. Observing this loss, Jason vividly recalls the trip to Eastern Europe the two took together in 2001.

As father and son travel from the town of Jay’s birth to the labor camp from which he escaped, and to Auschwitz, where many in his family were lost, the stories Jason’s father has told all his life come alive. So too do Jason’s own memories of the way his father’s past complicated and impacted Jason's own inner life.

Shmuel's Bridge shows history through a double lens: the memories of a growing son’s complex relationship with his father and the meditations of that son who, now grown, finds himself caring for a man losing all connection to a past that must not be forgotten.

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Jason Sommer is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Portulans in the University of Chicago’s Phoenix Poets Series. He has been recognized with an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems about the Jewish experience and read from his work at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum’s program “Speech and Silence: Poetry and the Holocaust.” A former Stanford University Stegner Fellow, he has held a Whiting Foundation writers’ fellowship as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. With Hongling Zhang, he has published collaborative book-length translations of Chinese fiction: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo and The Bathing Women by Tie Ning, which was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Sommer lives in St. Louis, Missouri.