Slouka - Nobodys son: a memoir

Nobodys Son

A Memoir

Mark Slouka

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

New York | London

Copyright 2016 by Mark Slouka

All rights reserved

First published as a Norton paperback 2017

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

Book design by Ellen Cipriano

Production manager: Louise Mattarelliano

Cover design by Kapo NG

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Slouka, Mark, author.

Title: Nobodys son : a memoir / Mark Slouka.

Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016018257 | ISBN 9780393292305 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Slouka, MarkFamily. | Slouka, MarkChildhood and youth. | Czech AmericansBiography. | Authors, AmericanBiography. | Mothers and sonsNew York (State)Biography. | Family secretsNew York (State).| New York (State)Biography.

Classification: LCC PS3569.L697 Z46 2016 | DDC 813.54 [B] dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018257

ISBN 978-0-393-29231-2 (e-book)

ISBN 978-0-393-35475-1 (pbk.)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

Further praise for

Nobodys Son

A masterwork... astonishingly fierce yet powerfully lyric. The story moves beyond the search for a self into the tangled narratives of both private memory and the ravaged history of twentieth-century central Europe.

Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education

Somber, funny, ruthless, tender, this singular memoir reverberates with obstinate, refreshing candor. Mark Slouka demonstrates powerfully the ways that memory is a function of imagination, like it or not.

Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head

The profoundest stories are about family, and the best memoirs are about memory; both human ties and human memory are deceptive, mysterious, recursive, contradictory. Sloukas previous writing has shown that he has both a hard skeptical brain and a huge questing heart. Nobodys Son is the book of his life, in both senses: he sings it like Bach throwing his baton, a mature master engaged, enamored, enraged.

Brian Hall, author of Fall of Frost

Pinned like Ahab to his whale, Mark Slouka sets out to confront his own leviathana past of violent upheaval and existential terror, a childhood eclipsed by his mothers madness. In his quiver: memories both sacred and flawed; hope, the thing without a GPS; resolve, the kind born of desperation; and love. The last will hit the mark. A brilliant memoir.

Kathryn Harrison, author of The Kiss: A Memoir and Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured

In Nobodys Son , Mark Slouka softens neither the events hes recalling nor his own struggle, sentence by sentence, to register them as truly as he can. Paradoxically, theyve yielded a thing of beauty.

David Gates, author of A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

ALSO BY MARK SLOUKA

Brewster: A Novel

Essays from the Nick of Time

The Visible World

Gods Fool

Lost Lake: Stories

War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and
the High-tech Assault on Reality

Acknowledgments

Im so grateful to have so many to be grateful to.

First, this book wouldnt exist if my wife, Leslie, hadnt understood that the time had come for me to write it. And said so. If our kids, Maya and Zack, hadnt backed her up, pushed me through, and, like Leslie, read and re-read. So here it is, guys. Without your love, I wouldnt have had the courage. Then again, without your love, it wouldnt matter.

I want to thank a handful of trusted friends for their early readings: Richard Abramowitz, Beth Beringer, Geoff Chin, Brian Hall, Dan Raeburn, Victoria Redel.

Im indebted to my editor, Jill Bialosky, for her early encouragement, her steady support, and, not least, for suggesting the title for The New Yorker essay that became the title of this book. Im grateful to her and to the folks at Norton for giving this orphan a home that feels like a home.

Finally, I owe a growing debt to my agent, Bill Clegg, whose instincts Ive come to trust implicitly, whose diagnoses are as accurate as his bedside manner is frank, supportive, generous. What more could you want?

FOR YOU, BACK WHEN.

Each one wraps himself in what burns him.

DANTE

Illustrations

My dad and his family, around the beginning of the war. Hes on the right. Rheinhold, my grandfather, is on the left.

Dad

Mom during the war, maybe seventeen years old.

Mom outside her childhood home. Her mother looks on in a polka-dot dress.

The German Reichs document giving my seventeen-year-old mother permission to live in her own country.

F. as a young man.

My mom teaching English at the language camp where she met F., summer 1946.

F.the famous skiing photo.

Mom and dad with a friend, somewhere in Germany, early 1950s.

Mom and dad with a friend, Sydney, 1951.

Mom in some unidentified train station, circa 1948.