Nelly Freiburg left Germany in 1938. At her son’s insistence, she returns to visit in 1972—just as the Munich Olympics are taking place.
Susan Coll, author of the novel Bookish People and Delia Ephron, screenwriter for movies like You’ve Got Mail and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and author of the memoir Left on Tenth: A Second Chance on Life, discuss the influence of love, loss and humor in the creative writing process. In conversation with Moment book & opinion editor Amy E. Schwartz. A special literary event celebrating the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest celebration.
The music of Chopin brings together a mysterious young Hungarian Holocaust survivor and an American music student. But just when romance is in the air, he vanishes.
“Have you heard about the movie?” Dorota asked. “What movie?” said Sylwia. Why, she thought, am I always the last to know?
“Why does the mother persist with the song sheets and the records? No one knows the answer. But still, she passes them out, and still they groan, and in the meantime, the songs work their way into the brain circuitry of the children.”
Lev returns from the park eager for breakfast. He pulls his chair across the tired linoleum and calls out, “Won’t you join me? Your show can wait.” He hates the way he sounds, like a grown man coaxing a cat from a tree…
Years went by, one lavishly slow day at a time, with hot summers, when we baked our bodies at the beach down the street or, on an occasional excursion, on the sands at Asbury Park or Bradley Beach some hours south of home, where we swam also in the pungent salty ocean waters; then came translucent autumn light, with the High Holidays catching our attention as much for the hours at synagogue they demanded of us as any sense of the holiness of things.
