When Jason Sommer and his father embarked on a trip across Eastern Europe in 2001, there was no book in mind, no press or publicity tours, no underlying motives beyond deepening their father-son relationship — one that played out against the backdrop of the Holocaust.
Two decades later, however, that trip became the inspiration for the memoir Shmuel's Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with my Survivor Father, which Sommer will discuss next week during appearances in Bloomington-Normal.
"I wouldn't have written the book had it not been for an editor friend who had a need for nonfiction books. He said, 'I know your poems and the stories in your poems. Do you have anything that would tie them together in any way?'" Sommer told WGLT in an interview.
"I said, 'Well, no. Oh yeah — we [went] on this trip, my father and I, to visit the places where he'd been interned, and the place of his birth, and we tried to find the bridge from which his brother tried to escape an Auschwitz-bound train transport.' There was silence on the other end of the phone line. Then he said, 'Write me a chapter.'"
Sommer went on to publish Shmuel's Bridge in 2022 and while it was his first published work of prose after five poetry collections, there were ways in which he had been preparing for it all his life.
Once, after Sommer was grown and his parents were "living in New Rochelle and my father had a study... and he called me in quite formally and said, 'You know about the man who carried water for my slave labor battalion? I would like you to write a poem about it,"' Sommer recalled. "That wasn't the first time I was given to understand that, since I was a writer, I ought to write about these things."
An an only child raised by a father who spoke 10 languages and a mother who taught English, Sommer was drawn to language and its idiosyncrasies early during his childhood in the Bronx. He spent a career following that passion, writing poetry that often included stories from or about family members and their experiences in the years before and after the Holocaust swept through Europe.
"For me, I was explicitly charged with carrying the stories at various times," Sommer said. "That felt frightening sometimes — an awesome responsibility, especially because I didn't always view the events in the way that my father did."
Sommer's memoir explores both what it means to have a formidable father whose past can overshadow the present, as well as the making of a memory itself. When the two men took the trip in 2001, Sommer's father was exhibiting signs of dementia. By the time Sommer was writing Shmuel's Bridge, the illness had progressed to the point where "he was garbling his own life."
"I had had this experience with him when he was in the whole of his mnemonic health and I wanted to make sure it wasn't lost," Sommer said.
But more than recounting, the book is aimed at exploring what it means to understand a person's history. Sommer, given to research, poured over maps and primary source documents ahead of the trip, seeking as much information as he could to both cross-reference his father's stories and plot a path for them to walk in Eastern Europe.
Much of the story revolves around the two men's journey to find the bridge that was near the place of his uncle's death. His uncle, on a train bound for the most infamous concentration camp in Poland, escaped the packed train car only to be shot dead shortly after.
"I like to say that Shmuel's Bridge was not only an actual bridge, but a bridge between my father and myself — a metaphorical bridge that really worked as a bridge," Sommer said. "There were moments where I saw the rawness of my father's injuries. I had a — maybe it's a writer's need, maybe it's a bad child's desire — to get closer to authenticity in some way."
Sommer's father died a year ago on Jan. 16.
Today, Sommer said he believes the trip was a success, in that it brought him a greater understanding of his father and extended family that he had never met.
"The Holocaust is a central event, but I'm not writing about the Holocaust. It's in the background," Sommer said. "I'm really writing about narrative itself: How story occupies and defines family and what one does to maneuver through, around, and with, that — and how that affects relationships, creates relationships and, finally, in this instance, facilitates relationships by me coming along with my father and being open to hearing as fully as I ever have what he experienced."
Sommer will tell some of those stories about his father and other family members during a Jan. 27 presentation at Moses Montefiore Temple in Bloomington.
Prior to that presentation, Sommer will lead a memoir-writing class from 10:30-11:30 a.m..at Normal Public Library. His memoir is also featured at Bobzbay Books in downtown Bloomington.
