Join us Thurs., Aug. 29, 6 pm as David Slucki, a Jewish Studies professor at the College of Charleston, will be here to discuss his new memoir Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (Wayne State Press, pb., 280 pp., $28).
Sing This at My Funeral tells the story of David’s father Charles and his grandfather Jakub, and the grave legacy that they each passed on. This is a story about the Holocaust and its aftermath, about absence and the scars that never heal, and about fathers and sons and what it means to raise young men.
In Sing This at My Funeral, tragedy follows the Slucki family across the globe: from Jakub’s early childhood in Warsaw, where he witnessed the death of his parents during World War I, to the loss of his family by the hand of the Nazis in April 1942 to his remarriage and relocation in Paris, where after years of bereavement he welcomes the birth of his third son before finally settling in Melbourne, Australia in 1950 in an attempt to get as far away from the ravages of war-torn Europe as he could. Charles (Shmulik in Yiddish) was named both after Jakub’s eldest son and his slain grandfather-a burden he carried through his life, which was one otherwise marked by optimism and adventure. The ghosts of these relatives were a constant in the Slucki home, a small cottage that became the lifeblood of a small community of Jewish immigrants. despite having been shaped by the ghosts of his father’s constantly hovering sorrow. This book interweaves the stories of these men with that of Slucki’s own upbringing, showing how traumatic family histories leave their mark for generations.
Blending the scholarly and literary, David grounds the story of his grandfather and father in the broader context of the twentieth century. Based on thirty years of letters from Jakub to his brother Mendel, on archival materials, and on interviews with family members, this is a unique story and an innovative approach to writing both history and family narrative. Students, scholars, and general readers of memoirs will enjoy this deeply personal reflection on family and grief.
David Slucki is an assistant professor in the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charleston. He is the author of The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History and co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation.
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