Publications
Fiction
Dorothea and Zvi, my great-great-grandparents, long dead, couldn’t ride the train, shuddered at the prospect. Instead, I rented a car, a stick shift, a small Peugeot van, one that I could hardly maneuver. I had only seen people drive stick in the movies. I thought: It can’t be that hard. But it was. In the trunk, we had Marja Süss, my second cousin once removed, fully dead, stiff and rotting. Were I pulled over, it would spell bad news. Question: What are you doing crossing borders with a dead body in your car? Answer: Well, officer, my great-great-grandparents thought it was a good idea. Doro and Zvi sat in the backseat, in their burial clothes, in better shape than they were when they died, telling me how to drive — this way and that . . . Read more
When they first played the tape, it sounded to them like jazz, the music unfolding itself from a boombox in the sand at the hightide line. The boys bobbed in the shallows, the stomach of the earth . . . Read more
Officially — according to the Nassau County Medical Examiner — officially, we were both dead. When we boarded the plane in LaGuardia, we had been in caskets. What an incredible idea, our grandchildren must have thought, unearthing the deceased. By the time the correct forms had been filed and our bodies exhumed (to be reburied in our country of origin) we’d been in the ground for a number of years. Opa Kurt since 1954, Omi Nelly since 1976. It was an uncommon procedure, but this was what our posterity wanted (maybe even needed) to do . . . Read more
For years, my father, full of imagination, would make up lies about how my mother had died, and, though I was no longer in Sri Lanka, though I was in Montpellier, hoping that a new place, that distance, might help, I still, on occasion, heard his voice, via phone calls, letters, conversations played out, long and painful, in my head, even on a day like this, when nearly all of Montpellier was outside, taking in the first spring day, a sudden change from the dreary winter the city had been enduring since I’d arrived, but I was indoors, among four other men, all around my age, either a few years older or a few younger, in a large, spartan room . . . Read more