Shmuel's Bridge

Starred review from November 22, 2021
Poet Sommer (Portulans) movingly combines a Holocaust memoir with an intimate account of his relationship with his survivor father. When, at age 98, his father, Jay, began to lose some of his memories, Sommer was desperate to find a way to preserve them. After escaping from a labor camp in Budapest in 1944, Jay had joined the Russian army and later emigrated to the U.S., where he got his college degree, had a successful teaching career, and built a family. In an effort to keep those and earlier memories intact, Sommer hit upon the idea of showing Jay videos from a trip they had taken in 2001 to eastern Europe to witness the places “that were the setting of his Holocaust experiences.” As the two revisit these memories together, the past and present beautifully collide in evocative prose and excerpts of poetry (“he’s penned beneath/ the stairs of a Budapest apartment house/ for days, in terror”) that whisk readers from the steps of Erzsébet School in Budapest—where Jay and other survivors began their “struggle toward a new life” in 1945—to the bridge where father and son commemorated the death of Jay’s brother Shmuel, who was killed en route to a Nazi camp. This stunning tribute isn’t to be missed.