Snow in August

Discussion Questions

Snow in August starts like a modern-day fairy tale, with the phrase “Once upon a cold and luminous morning, in an urban hamlet of tenements, factories, and trolley cars on the western slopes of the borough of Brooklyn, a boy named Michael Devlin woke in the dark.” In what other ways does the author use fairy tale elements, and why do you think he does so?

Heroes and villains, both real and imaginary, are a significant part of Michael’s life. What does he learn about heroism in the course of the book? Does his hero worship help or hinder him? Do you think that heroes are necessary in our lives? Do you think children today have fewer heroes available to them than Michael does in 1946?

One of Michael’s greatest worries in Snow in August is whether or not to tell the police about Frankie McCarthy beating up Mister G. Michael’s mother says that informers are the “scum of God’s sweet earth,” but Rabbi Hirsch tells him, “You keep quiet about some crime, it’s just as bad as the crime.” Do you agree with Kate Devlin or Rabbi Hirsch? Whom do you think the author agrees with?

Over the course of Snow in August, Michael learns Yiddish and Rabbi Hirsch learns English. Both of them are fascinated by the power of words, and ultimately Michael draws on their power to create the Golem. What does this suggest about the power of language? Do words still have power today?

The shadow of World War II and the Holocaust looms over Snow in August. Both Kate Devlin and Rabbi Hirsch have lost a spouse to the war. Are there ways in which Kate and Leah Yaretzky are similar? What about the Rabbi and Tommy Devlin?

The progress of Jackie Robinson’s first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers is a recurring motif in the novel. Why do Michael and the Rabbi follow his story so fervently? What do they learn from it?

Michael is often moved or inspired by the music of his time, from popular music to Dvořák. How do the titles of these pieces reflect the themes in Snow in August? Is the radio just a conduit for the music, or do you think it has a wider significance?

Snow in August is a novel full of miraculous happenings. Were you surprised that Michael was able to re-create the Golem? Why do you think the author used miracles instead of more realistic events?

On Writing Snow in August

There are many valid ways to write novels, but I’m one of those countless writers who must begin with the rough material of my own life. Like all human beings, I was shaped by the accidents of living in a special time and a particular place. The time was as important as the place. I was born in the middle of the Depression, came to consciousness during the Second World War, and lived my adolescence during the great optimistic years that followed the war. The place was Brooklyn, the largest borough of New York City; a place suffused with a peculiar angular light, reflecting off the harbor; a place with hundreds of churches, many libraries, a lovely park set in its heart, and a strand of beach at Coney Island. Some rich people lived there, along with many families that came to be called middle class, but in its style, its toughness, its valor, Brooklyn was proudly working class.

Each neighborhood was a separate urban hamlet, with its own heroes, villains, and myths. My neighborhood, not far from Prospect Park, was a mixture of Irish and Italian immigrants and their children, and a smaller number of Jews. The architecture was as jumbled as the classes: proud brownstones owned by people who worked in the distant towers of Manhattan; cheaper one-family homes where clerks and ironworkers and newspaper pressmen raised their families; and tenements that housed the poor, built with darkening red bricks and fire escapes zigzagging on their faces like iron calligraphy.

We lived in a tenement. Our railroad flat had five rooms, but only one bedroom had a door. We were on the top floor, able to survey the street on one end and see the skyline of New York from the other. We were not much different from all the others who lived in the tenements: family was the essential core of our lives, and we lived most of that family life in the kitchen. In the kitchen we ate and talked and listened. We did our homework at the kitchen table. We listened to the radio in the kitchen, our imaginations crowded with Captain Midnight and Tom Mix and Terry and the Pirates, and then by the grave voices of Edward R. Murrow and Gabriel Heatter, bringing news of distant battlefields. The kitchen door was never locked.

But there was a sense of extended family too. There were widening geographies in that neighborhood, extending from the flat to the building to the block to the adjoining blocks and finally to the parish. We knew everyone in our building, their strengths and weaknesses. On hot summer evenings, in those years before air conditioning, the grown-ups took folding chairs out to the sidewalk in front of the building and sipped iced tea and talked. They talked of everything: past, present, and future, people they knew and people they didn’t. The immigrants talked about the Old Country. Sometimes a voice would rise in song. We knew the owners of every store along the avenue. And though we did not think of them that way, we understood that there were some basic institutions: the Church, the Bar, the Police Station. They represented stability and continuity. The bars were more than simple drinking establishments; they were social clubs, places where men could drown their sorrows if a son was killed on some Pacific island, refuges from all difficulties, hiring halls for men who had lost their jobs.

The great goal for working men was the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where two of my cousins worked, and where I would serve a year as an apprentice sheet metal worker. A job at the Navy Yard was a civil service job, and that could last a lifetime. Because of the Depression, the need for steady work was central to all of them, even the kids. I started working at eleven, after school, delivering a newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle. Other kids delivered groceries, shined shoes, washed windows, shoveled snow in wintertime. There was a general assumption that working for money was more important than education; I didn’t meet anyone who had gone to college until I was in the U.S. Navy. Most young men quit school at sixteen to go to work. Eventually, I did, too.

But if we were part of a parochial hamlet, there was another presence that bound us to all other parts of Brooklyn: the baseball team called the Dodgers. We read the sports pages of the Brooklyn Eagle (and the other newspapers) as if they held the secrets of all life. They were, in a religious sense, the fundamental texts. My father, an immigrant from Belfast in Northern Ireland, became an American through those sports pages. If Jorge Luis Borges had known the Dodgers and those newsprint pages of heroic deeds and invincible statistics, he might have written a story in which the texts invented us. They were part of the dailiness of our lives, as were the games on the radio described with laconic exuberance by Red Barber. We were all so young we thought that world would last forever.

By the end of the 1950s, everything was gone. The Dodgers were gone, the Brooklyn Eagle was gone, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard was dying. Red Barber had become the announcer for the hated Yankees. Television had arrived, and so had heroin. Nobody sat outside anymore on summer evenings; they watched Ed Sullivan or Jerry Lewis or Sid Caesar in the blue light of the television screens. The kitchens were abandoned; they had finally found a use for those living rooms, and ate dinner on folding trays, sucked into the voracious tube. For the first time, as junkies began their restless gnawing prowl, they locked their kitchen doors. You saw more and more moving vans in the neighborhood, heading for the distant suburbs. I remember feeling, as did so many others, that the world I knew was gone forever.

This novel, like some of my other writings, is about that lost world. In that larger sense, it is, of course, autobiographical. That is, I lived in that world, on those streets, with those people. To be sure, my father did not die in the war; his left leg was amputated in 1927 after a terrible accident in a soccer game, and he worked in a war plant for the duration of the war and then in a factory across the street from where we lived. In 1947, I had two younger brothers and a younger sister. Michael Devlin is me, and he is not me. But there are details in this novel that do come directly from life.

I was, for example, a Shabbos goy. That is, I was a Christian kid who on Saturday mornings would perform the small tasks that were proscribed by a strict adherence to the laws against working on the Sabbath. I turned on the lights. I switched on the gas in the stove. These were small things, but years later I realized their importance. By walking into that synagogue when I was eleven, I was beginning the end of my own parochialism. I was literally walking out of the parish. Out of the life I knew into a life I did not know. And that process began by crossing the street in the midst of a snowstorm.

For years, I wanted to write that story. There were abstract things I wanted to express, but I wanted them to live in a novel, not be written in a tract. I wanted to acknowledge the great gifts that I, and all Americans, had received from the Jews: tenacity, irony, moral intelligence. Starting in that synagogue, and then across a lifetime, I had been challenged, enriched, illuminated by the men and women who had offered us those gifts. To grow up in New York after the war was to live in the shadow of Jewish intellectual brilliance. Through books, articles, essays, fiction, poetry, and teaching, that amazing generation of Jews, most of them educated in public universities, set the terms for American thought and sensibility. They also established standards of excellence that would intimidate all the rest of us for many years to come.

One of those standards was about the insistence on moral intelligence. It wasn’t enough to take a list of commandments in your hand and obey them; you had to think about them. This was essential to the children of other diasporas, because that era, for all the sunniness it retains in our nostalgias, was also a time of unsettling darkness. We had to deal with McCarthyism and witch hunts. We had to think about and understand and confront intolerance, in its crude forms and in its subtle ones. We had to understand racism, which for white kids in the urban North remained something we heard about but never saw. Two momentous events forced us to think in new ways, and both are in this novel. The first was experienced in the dark. In the late summer of 1945, when I was ten, I sat in the RKO Prospect and saw for the first time the films from Buchenwald. I was horrified, and had nightmares for months, awaking in fear and trembling, to be comforted by my mother. Those gray images of skeletal figures, of bony bodies stacked upon each other like offal, of eyes staring from gaunt faces like silent accusations: they drove themselves deep into my mind and my imagination. At school that fall, I asked the first moral questions of my life: How could this happen? Who did this? How could we have let this happen? There were no adequate answers. There are none now.

The other was the arrival of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn. There were no black people in our neighborhood, other than a tall, silent man who worked as a janitor in one of the large buildings near Prospect Park. We vaguely remembered hearing about race riots in Harlem and Detroit in 1943, but that seemed long ago, back when we were seven or eight years old. We knew very little about race or racism. It was never discussed in school or on the radio. There were few blacks in the movies we saw on Saturday mornings, and these were usually comical figures or “natives” in Tarzan films. There were no black heroes. There were no black villains. As Ralph Ellison would soon make vivid to us, blacks were invisible men.

And here came Jack Roosevelt Robinson. Number 42. That summer our lives changed. Robinson became the closest thing I had to a role model (a phrase that did not then exist). If he could take the insults and race-baiting he had to take that first year, then so could the rest of us when confronted with other forms of stupidity or brutality or evil. If he could defy everything that was placed against him, so could we. He played with controlled intensity, doing everything to the best of his abilities, and then adding something else: desire. That fierce desire was a form of fire. Burning inside of Robinson, it warmed all the rest of us, particularly those of us who were young. It lit up our imaginations. It lit up Brooklyn. It lit up America. So Robinson is crucial to this novel. There is a very Catholic way of reading it: the rabbi is the Father, the boy is the Son, and Jackie Robinson is the Holy Ghost.

Still, the novel was a long time coming. It finally came together for me in 1989, during a trip to Prague, a city that had existed for me only in imagination. I was there as a newspaperman, covering the fall of Communism. Those days and nights were as glorious a time as I’ve ever spent as a journalist, watching the Czech young, led with moral intelligence by the writer Vaclav Havel, as they made their final joyous assault on the cement face of the State. They used language against the State. They used intelligence against the State. They used laughter and irony as their supreme weapons. In contrast, the old Stalinist hacks of the regime looked gray and sullen when they arrived at their palaces, like archbishops who had ceased believing in God.

But during this extraordinary week, there was much downtime. I decided to use those free hours to see where Franz Kafka had lived. There were no guidebooks with this information, because the long-dead Kafka was out of favor with the Communist hackocracy. Still, in the company of a translator who was an ally of Havel, I set out. It turned out that Kafka had lived in many places in Prague, but our search inevitably took us to the old medieval Jewish ghetto, and to the Alt-Neu Synagogue.

And there, something strange happened. I stepped into the cemetery that adjoins the synagogue, a small plot where, I was told, Jews lay buried twelve deep. And I felt a shudder, a pebbling of skin, a sense of immanence, as if I had suddenly connected with all the lost centuries. The dead were not dead. The past was here, in this holy ground. Their past. My past. I had only felt that sense of connection once before, on my first journey to Ireland, as a son of the Irish diaspora. I went to walk upon the hill of Tara, holy place of the pagan past, and trembled: feeling all the mad Celts dancing and singing under the moon. Here in Prague, Jews and Celts danced together.

In one corner of the cemetery there was a statue of a learned man, larger and more imposing than all others, stern, austere. I asked my translator who he was. The translator told me that this was Rabbi Loew. And then he told me about the Golem, pointing to the high stories of the synagogue, where the Golem was said to rest. I said: “God, I wish I’d had a golem when I was eleven.”

And uttering that wish, I knew I had my novel at last.

Here is that novel, set in a time before television, when our imaginations were stirred by talk at kitchen tables, by books, by songs, by an occasional movie, and by the radio. It was a time when boys could believe in magic words. They could believe that Billy Batson would say “Shazam” and become Captain Marvel. They could believe in the extraordinary transformations of Irish legends and myths, often accomplished with magic words. They could hear Yiddish and believe that it was the lost Irish language of the Celts. They could believe in the secret language of the Kaballah.

Again, this is a novel, not a tract. But it has a very simple theme: first we imagine, then we live. If it has a message for the young it is this: imagine your entire lives, not simply your youth. Enjoy that youth, revel in it, but also imagine a time and a life beyond Saturday night. You never know how a life will turn out, any more than a novelist knows how his novel will end; you think you know where you are going, and then the road takes a sudden turn. But there must be a large vision of that journey, a life-enchancing sense of possibility and triumph. Yes, there will be diversions. Yes, there will be defeats. There might even be tragedies. But if we do not imagine, we do not live. We can imagine splendid careers, great loves, amazing children. We can imagine worlds we have never seen, those of the distant past, those in the immediate future. We can imagine Prague in the years of mad Rudolf II, and we can imagine Jackie Robinson before we ever get to see him play.

The Golem is a triumphant symbol of the human imagination. On its simplest level, his tale is a parable about the power of moral intelligence. The imagination allows us to confront all horror and all evil. In the end, the imagination opens out, like a great symphony, to encompass all the living and the dead, to say to the forces of evil, as the Jews continue to say, a half century after the Holocaust: You cannot win. You can kill us. You can insult us. You can marginalize us. But we shall triumph. And we shall dance.